Category Internet

Εκτός κατάταξης

Δεν ξέρω αν θα ήμασταν πάνω από την μεγάλη πλειοψηφία των Αφρικανικών χωρών στο Web Index του Tim Berners Lee, αλλά είμαι βέβαιος πως το γεγονός πως δεν είμαστε πουθενά στην κατάταξη είναι δείγμα της έλλειψης σοβαρότητας, ενδιαφέροντος και αξίας που δίνουμε στην δικτύωσή μας ως χώρα. Αν μη τι άλλο, εν διαμέσω κρίσης, οι επενδύσεις για την βελτίωση των δικτύων ευρυζωνικότητας φαίνεται να έχουν παύσει, οι επιδόσεις των υφιστάμενων συνδέσεων έχουν παγώσει ή χειροτερέψει για πολύ κόσμο και εκεί που η Ευρώπη περνά ταχύτατα σε δίκτυα νέας γενιάς με ευρεία διαθεσιμότητα VDSL2+ και FTTC/FTTB/FTTH εμείς ακόμη συζητούμε για εγκατάσταση περισσότερων mini DSLAMs έτσι ώστε να μην βρίσκεται η μεγάλη πλειοψηφία των συμπολιτών μας καταδικασμένη σε ταχύτητες κάτω των 5-6MBps. Φυσικά, στα μάτια των πολλών, όταν το διακύβευμα είναι η ίδια η επιβίωση, η ευρυζωνικότητα καταντά ένα γραφικό αντικείμενο συζήτησης. Κι'όμως, αν μη τι άλλο, αν η 'ανταγωνιστικότητα' της Ελλάδος θέλουμε να σημαίνει κάτι παραπάνω από την εξαθλίωση του βιοτικού επιπέδου των κατοίκων της, αν ο στόχος μας δεν είναι η εργατική τάξη, η αποδοτικότητα του δημοσίου ή η διαφθορά της Κίνας ή της Ινδίας αλλά αυτές της Σουηδίας ή της Φινλανδίας, τότε η ευρυζωνικότητα θα έπρεπε να θεωρείται μείζον θέμα στους κύκλους των αρμόδιων υπηρεσιών και υπουργείων. Και προφανώς αυτό σημαίνει πως η Ελλάδα --- μάλλον --- θα έπρεπε να εμφανίζεται στο ευρετήριο του Tim Berners Lee και δη σε θέση που δεν θα μας προκαλούσε συλλογικά κατάθλιψη.

Hotmail

In the summer of 1996 hotmail was released to the world and it wasn't much later that I opened my first account there. It was an innovative email platform that promised to liberate people from their ISP provided email. It was one of my first non-ISP provided email addresses and one I still have. Like today, the mid-1990s was an era of walled-gardens, only at the time they weren't called Facebook, twitter or Google, but AOL, Compuserve and loads of local BBSes offered by several small ISPs. Service providers were only beginning to adopt their, still current, position as 'carriers of content and services' not purveyors thereof. And in this environment, hotmail was innovative, in the same way that netflix, skype and all those other unbundled services are innovative for they liberate you from the increasingly threatening grip of ISPs and the few dominant players that keep entering new markets, doing a bad job at it, but winning 'cause their financial prowess kills the competition in the meantime. I used to use my hotmail account quite a bit between 1997 and 1999. I gave up shortly after Microsoft started really changing it --- at the beginning they didn't do much to it; it still ran on FreeBSD and Solaris. By 2001 it had already lost much of its 'innovative' features (and it ran on Windows 2000) and under Microsoft's ownership it stagnated as other services rendered it obsolete. By 2002, my hotmail account was only used for a few quasi-dodgy online merchants to whom I didn't want to give a more 'important' email address and since GMail took the world by storm with its 1GB offer in 2004, I practically stopped using it alltogether. As such it is now full of enough spam to feed the world twice over. And now, Microsoft decided that hotmail is to be no more, replaced by the title of its equally mediocre monstrosity of an email client, Outlook, and revamped to look like an app of their Metro environment. Yet another one of those early, pioneering web brands of the 1990s is, even in name, dead. Ah well, at least we still have Amazon =)

On Device Identifiers.

Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps […]

Independent companies

WSJ: Before Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. died, he approached you with a buyout offer. Why did you turn it away? Mr. Ferdowsi: The problem that we're trying to solve is a problem that only an independent company can solve. We want to let you use a Mac, or Windows PC, or iPad, or Android, without having to think about any of the technical details. It isn't a problem any of those larger companies is going to be as inclined to solve in the same way we are.
A very very pertinent point, seeing that we're experiencing a renaissance of massive, vertical closed systems, walled gardens and a childish desire to lock people into proprietary platforms that try to offer everything. Look at how Google, Facebook, Apple and now Microsoft are heavily promoting their respective 'authentication' platforms, playing the game of ignoring_the_competition. Facebook would certainly like you to use their APIs to authenticate your users, but they don't have to try much because they have the most powerful database right now. Microsoft heavily promotes their 'Microsoft Account' (previously known by half a dozen names) and will do even more in Windows 8, while Apple makes ever increasing use of their Apple ID, across their products and services. Google, in lieu of their recent privacy terms update, needs no introduction I think with Google+ and every other service tied to a single Google account. The fact that Dropbox fully supports practically every single system platform I can think of using is reason enough for me to prefer it from competing services (Ubuntu One, Microsoft Skydrive, iCloud etc) and a refreshingly sane choice they made contrasted heavily by that of the established market leaders who fear of inadvertently promoting their competition.

Break free, create your own walled garden.

It's ironic, how 'ease' becomes the noose that chokes innovation and development. AOL, Facebook, iTunes, they all offer closed, proprietary solutions to 'problems' that --- in more ways than one --- are not so hard to solve. Solutions that seem to 'work', that 'succeed' because the 'trend' is to embrace 'easy', as opposed to 'moderately challenging', because the 'smart money' is behind them and because of network effects. In the last few years, that is after the wave of 'Web 2.0' (ironically, yet another 'trend' exploited by 'experts' that abused it for profit) subsided, Facebook started making serious money. Its real success as an advertising platform is not only arguably minimal, but quite controversial. It took a long time for the advertising industry and the hordes of marketing monkeys to embrace Facebook's walled garden approach and doing what they do best, counting. Only this time it wasn't 'impressions' or 'clicks' or 'conversions' they were counting, but 'likes', another frivolous metric that doesn't really mean anything in the real world. Facebook apps, once touted as the next big thing and a threat for the web, were stillborn, largely because Facebook itself made significant steps to expand beyond the confines of its site, by creating interfaces, programmatic and user, for other platform-owners to embed in or integrate with their platforms. So we got a slew of 'social plugins', more 'APIs', etc. But there were some exceptions, like Zynga, a gaming company living inside Facebook. Now, Zynga just launched Zynga.com. And it's a big deal, because this is the first Facebook-dependent business of significant scale that expands beyond the confines of this walled garden du jour. The whole 'frenzy' with Facebook in the ad world is now in its third year. As with AOL's endeavours fifteen years ago, the Facebook frenzy may be past its prime; as a teenager of the early-to-mid 1990s, AOL 'keywords' seemed to me like a pointless exercise, yet another 'top-down', force-fed business model that people never cared about. Clearly people care about Facebook; they care about the platform that connects them to people they love: their friends and their relationships, news from their social circles, people they'd like to know better or simply keep in touch. They could hardly care less about Facebook pages, Facebook ads, the Facebook business. Sadly, marketers and advertisers, typically the last group to perceive change --- and perhaps the most dependent on 'convention' (make no mistake, Facebook is convention, as is Google), will take a bit longer to 'wake up'. That Zynga chose to move beyond Facebook is undoubtedly a wake up call and a sign of maturity in an industry that more than often adopts the strategy of others, instead of coming up with its own.

Τουλάχιστον να γνωρίζουμε.

Πριν από περίπου ενάμιση μήνα 'υποβαθμίστηκε' η ταχύτητα της σύνδεσής μου στο σπίτι, για λόγους που μπορώ να αποδώσω μόνον στην ανικανότητα του ΟΤΕ. Παρ'ότι ενδιαφέρουσα περίπτωση που συνδυάζει τεχνική ανικανότητα και μια γερή δόση Κάφκα --- δεν θα μπώ σε λεπτομέρειες (ζούμε άλλωστε μια ιδιαίτερα σουρρεαλιστική εποχή που κάνει ασήμαντη την εν λόγω προσωπική ιστορία), αποφάσισα να ψάξω λίγο online για παρόμοια προβλήματα, την θέση της ΕΕΤΤ για το χάλι των ευρυζωνικών συνδέσεων στην Ελλάδα κλπ. Στο ψάξιμο βρήκα το εξής: Εν διαμέσου κρίσης, στα μέσα του καλοκαιριού που μας πέρασε ξεκίνησε την πιλοτική του λειτουργία το ΣΑΠΕΣ, το Σύστημα Αποτίμησης Ποιότητας Ευρυζωνικών Συνδέσεων της ΕΕΤΤ, το οποίο καταγράφει την ταχύτητα της ευρυζωνικής σας σύνδεσης και άπεικονίζει τα στοιχεία ως overlay σε χάρτη. Παρ'ότι τα αποτελέσματα είναι ακόμη σχετικά λίγα, η εικόνα είναι ενδιαφέρουσα και οι 'μαύρες' τρύπες, περιοχές με φοβερά κακή ποιότητα ευρυζωνικής σύνδεσης, πολλές. Εαν δεν το γνωρίζετε ήδη, εγγραφείτε (είναι γρήγορο και σχεδόν ανώνυμο -- χρειάζεται ένα email και την διεύθυνσή σας) και κάντε μια μέτρηση της ταχύτητας της σύνδεσής σας, ιδιαίτερα εάν αντιμετωπίζετε πρόβλημα με αυτή. Όσοι περισσότεροι συμμετάσχουν, τόσο περισσότερες πληροφορίες θα έχει η ΕΕΤΤ και ευελπιστώ πως αν υπάρξει καλή συμμετοχή ενδεχομένως να αποκτήσουμε καλύτερες συνδέσεις μια ώρα αρχύτερα.

Javaless Guardian

Guardian.co.uk is switching from Java to Scala. I'm surprised it took so long and that other Java shops are not following en masse --- it could be because of how different and esoteric Scala can be, especially to Java programmers. The linked infoQ article contains an interesting discussion with the Guardian folks. Programming enterprise web applications (or anything, for that matter) in Java is painful for anyone mature enough to have experienced the wealth and breadth of tools out there, given how primitive, verbose and unproductive it is, and how much it caters for the lowest common denominator of a programmer. That's not to say that Scala is the best choice for everyone, let alone those not starting from scratch, but given the Guardian's existing infrastructure and systems, I guess that it's the best choice they could've made.

Google Art Project

Amazing work by Google, I hope it expands to other great museums all over the globe.

What about {Angle,Diamond} gradients?

In this draft CSS3 spec, preliminary support for gradients is defined. Where are diamond and angle gradients? They may not be used as much as the others, but I find it weird that they are not added to a newly spec'd standard, given that it's not that hard to implement them.

Τέλος Εποχής για το VoIP στην HOL.

Λίγο πριν τους Ολυμπιακούς της Αθήνας, με το ADSL να γράφει μόνον έναν χρόνο ζωής στην χώρα μας, η Hellas On Line έκανε το αδιανόητο: πρόσφερε, μέσω του προγράμματος evoice, την δυνατότητα απόκτησης αριθμού αθηνών (213xxxxxxx) χωρίς πάγιο τέλος, βασισμένο σε SIP και με ιδιαίτερα ανταγωνιστικές χρεώσεις για αστικούς και υπεραστικούς προορισμούς. Γνώρισα την υπηρεσία […]