Category: Blogs

Partial Feeds

~ rbonini

Partial Feeds are the worst kind of feed there is to subscribe to. They drive me insane.

Fortunately, a few bloggers (in my blogroll, that is) are seeing the light and changing to full text feeds. Recently Michael J. Totten changed to full text feeds and I read more of his stuff now as a result.

Steve’s post at the Ransom Thoughts blog ( found via Scoble’s link blog) has the exact same thoughts about this. He goes a bit further than me and says he’s unsubscribing from partial feeds.

Feeds are there for the express purpose of giving people easier access to your information, not baiting links to drive up the PageRank and roll in the AdWords revenue.

Remember the blogosphere is a community with a vast amount of information contained in its many pages (and feeds). Since it is a community, a single blog survives only by the grace of others that link to it.

So be nice to people when it comes to full text feeds – let them read your stuff with as little effort as possible – it’ll help your blog in the long run.

The first comment to Steve’s post puts it best:

Life’s too short for [a] clickthrough.

Quote of the Day

~ rbonini

I can’t belive I’m quoting Scott Adams, but here it is:

Okay, so my plan is this. America becomes the disaster recovery center of the world. To some extent, we already are. We generally offer help when needed, and we have lots of assets for that sort of thing. But we haven’t taken it to the next level and “Switzerlandized” the concept. We need to be more known as the country that finds people under rubble, as opposed to our current plan of being known as the people who put people there in the first place.

Go on. Read the whole plan.

Microsoft Surface, part 1

~ rbonini

Like the rest of the blogging world (Scoble, ScottGu, Sam Gentile to name a few), I’m assimilating the possibilities of this new Microsoft technology.

( in fact, I think I’m making Microsoft sound like a not-so-bad version of the Borg – They are characterized by relentless pursuit of targets for assimilation, their collective consciousness that enables rapid adaptability to almost any defense, and the ability to continue functioning properly despite seemingly devastating blows. They have become a powerful symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against whom “resistance is futile.” – couldn’t resist that quote)

I’ve just gone to the Microsoft Surface site and found that its using, wait for it, Adobe Flash Player 9.

Beta or not, Silverlight should have been used here – when you use your own products, it inspires confidence in your customer base ( in Microsoft’s case, .Net developers).

And I like the logo. Its in similar vein to  the Silverlight one. The new, high tech, sci-fi like logos Microsoft are now using show how Microsoft is positioning itself to ride these new technologies into the future and guarantee its continued existence. Just a thought.

Interesting Comparison

~ rbonini

Frank at pseudorandom has this to say:

Since Bush took office, the Canadian dollar is up 39.76 percent. When you consider that Canada has a comparable (though much smaller) economy, a comparable standard of living, a border that’s essentially open to most trade, and a higher level of government services, this becomes an amazing statistic. It’s what happens when one government runs budget surpluses year after year, while its neighbor, after briefly running a budget surplus under one president, begins running unprecedented budget deficits under his successor.

Never thought of it that way.

"Patents Pending"

~ rbonini

I really should be craming for an exam, but this is more fun.

Over the past few days there has been a huge amount of hoohah over Microsofts Claim that thereare 235 patents that have been violated in OpenSource products.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted a lenghly reply that attack the root of Microsofts way of doing business:

With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else’s operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.

So we took that advice. We started by securing the software assets we were building – so that we could convey them under trusted open source licenses to a community we’d just started nurturing. We redoubled our focus on innovation, in hardware and software, that would differentiate our offerings. Not just as good as the competition, but vastly better. We supported Linux on our SPARC systems, and forced ourselves to open up every business we operate – Solaris wasn’t the hammer for all nails. Nor was SPARC. Nor Java.

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

If that didn’t sting enough, Tim O’Reilly compared Microsofts claim to the one McCarthy made about here being 206 commmunists in the state department:

Does Microsoft’s claim that Free and Open Source Software infringes on 235 Microsoft patents remind anyone of Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about communists at the State Department? Whether or not it’s true, citing such a number without providing any detail is such a classic FUD move that, to me at least, it just makes Microsoft look ridiculous. More recently, it’s reminiscent of the bluster of the SCO case against IBM.

The question I keep asking myself is: If it comes to it, who is Microsoft going to sue? Open Source Software by its very nature involves a cast of thousands.  The second issue involves the way that Microsoft is going to prove it. The only way it can do that is to show that its own propiotory code is exactly the same as the code in said Open Source Software. Which negates the whole idea of keeping your code under wraps.

Perhaps, and this is a long shot, Microsoft should follow Sun and reap the benifits:

In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.

Net result? Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution (yup, read that sentence again – or see the report, here, page 51). We joined forces with the likes of Google and IBM and Red Hat to drive the Open Document Format, accelerating document interchange. ODF is now accelerating globally, as the standard trusted by governments and academic institutions for multi-generational document interchange. It is an unstoppable force, no threat can kill a country’s drive for independence or self-sufficiency (remember, the network’s a social utility, too).

Adobe Apollo (Updated)

~ rbonini

Jim Turner, via Scobe, holds this interesting opinion of Adobe in the aftermath of the launch:

I can tell you what they are not doing, they are not having a conversation with the influential people in their industry.  Sure they are presenting some cool things and people like Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble, and others are all madly discussing the new apps and talking about it, but from the Adobe side I get nothing but crickets chirping.  Where is the Adobe blogger?  If they are truly in competition with Microsoft, how about competing?  Put a company evangelist on a blog and let the blogger talk to all of the people now linking to the rest of the discussion.  Adobe may be getting excellent marks for their new and latest in technology but I give them an F in showing that they are truly in the market of discussing their products.

I tend to agree here. Microsoft has changed its public image completely simply becuase of the 3000+ Microsoft bloggers out there. Every single start-up, I’ve noticed, has a blog or two on their site. Seems everyone is jumping into the blogging trend with two feet. Well, nearly everyone. Amazon stands out as the big tech company that dosent have a corprate blogging strategy/guidelines/policy/site going.  Traditional customer relations tools simply don’t have the oopmh they used to. Blogging turns faceless corprate giants into somthing a little more human. 

Mea Cupla:

Scoble corrects the record:

Jim Turner says about Adobe: “I can tell you what they are not doing, they are not having a conversation with the influential people in their industry.” and “Where is the Adobe blogger?”

I guess Jim missed that Adobe has tons of blogs.

And, I would expect that Adobe will increase the discussion over the next few months. I am telling them not to invite me next time, but to get a bunch of .NET developers in a room like Scott Hanselman. Those are the influentials that Adobe really needs to have a conversation with.

I’m heading over right now to blogs.adobe.com to see what interesting stuff I can find.

AJAX

~ rbonini

I’ve not that hard a look at AJAX, but this post shared by Roberto Scoble caught my eye. The crux of the post is looking at a new AJAX bases platform, a company called Morfik. From what I read it does push the boundaries as to what can be don within the browser sandbox:

the crux of it is that Morfik uses 100% Ajax and renders in the native browser. Whereas all the other platforms use non-native browser plug-ins (like Flash) or render outside the browser. Adobe’s Apollo and Laszlo both largely output in Flash (a browser plug-in) and Microsoft’s WPF renders outside the browser.

Also, while Google is Java  heavy   (no offense intended) for their UI’s, Morfik:

allows developers to use high-level programming languages (which give the developer more power – e.g. BASIC, C#, Pascal) to create web apps. It does this by converting apps from high level language INTO Ajax code.

This is great news. As a VB /C# Developer, it might just make ASP.Net 2.0 fade into the background as far as UI is concerned.

I’ll be watching.

Yet another “The Network is the Computer” post

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Johnathan Schwatrz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just posted something interesting and something I’ve never thought about.

Nowdays, server-side hardware is tending to focus on unilisation rather than sheer clock speed. I guess the point is to make more use of each single clock pulse. if you have 8 cores with 32 threads executing 32 instructions per clock pulse, it beats the hell out of a single core with a single thread exectuting one instruction per clock pulse. This is known as server virtualization . Essentially because you can assign a different OS ( never mind application) to each core, effectivly getting 8 servers ( in the case of the Niagra chip) for the price one one physical server. Not that you’d find 8 server OS’s, which is beside the point. But all this fancy stuff is usually dedicated to servers ( Intel Core Duos and Quads to the contrary). And servers need to be networked. And you only have one physical network to use. Or do you:

That’s why we just introduced Project Neptune – a silicon project that marries the parallelism of the microprocessor (for Intel, AMD and SPARC systems), with the parallelism of the underlying operating system (Solaris, Linux or Windows), with parallelism in the network itself. Which in concert with some software magic (which goes by the name of the Crossbow project) allows enterprises to collapse cabling, ports, cards and spending – by bringing parallelism to basic network infrastructure (for geeks, you can take multiple TCP streams and allocate them to different processor threads, spreading out load and freeing up CPU’s/ports). Ports become a physical convenience, just like a server – what’s happening inside depends upon rules or policies set by the user/administrator to automate such decisions. Like I said, the network is the computer, and the computer’s virtualized, so why not the network?

Its simply too obvious to notice till its pointed out. For each physical port attached to your machine, you can have one physical connection. Here Sun engineers have turned that inside out, giving network engineers more bang for their buck ( or is that more connections for their ports?).

It really is an elegant solution.