Adium 1.0
After many months of development and many more β releases, Adium 1.0 was released today! It's got loads of fixes and improvements and it's based on libgaim 2.0. Yay.
Blood Diamond (2006)
Είδα πριν από λιγο το Blood Diamond. Πολύ ευχάριστη έκπληξη, ιδιαίτερα αν λάβει κανείς υπ’όψην του πόσο σπάνια μια αμερικάνικη ταινία αυτού του budget και με τέτοιο cast καταφέρνει να προσεγγίσει ένα τόσο σημαντικό θέμα — ή μάλλον μια σειρά από ζητήματα που αφορούν την Αφρική. Ένα Constant Gardener meets Hotel Rwanda με μια δόση […]
I dare anybody to [hack into] once a month on the Windows machine.
Errr, right. Despite his --- numerous --- amazingly bad evaluations (e.g. the importance of the 'net in the mid-1990s), his volatile opinions on important matters (e.g. patents), lack of ethics and piss-poor software, Bill Gates has time and again proven to be an important thinker when it comes to technology and its importance in society. It's a shame to see he's lost it. In this latest interview in Newsweek it's actually surprising to see how he can be so off-base. While there's no doubt that Apple is king in catchy marketing and shameless exaggeration of its value and its products' {importance, features} in its marketing campaigns, Microsoft is no spring chicken either ('Get the Facts' campaign anyone?). Its funny how Gates tries to engage in the pompous reality skewing and typical polemic that his once-ideologically-charged-turned-loser-turned-mighty-tech-salesman rival, the mercurial Steve Jobs, is famous for. Unfortunately for him Gates lacks the 'Charisma +834' rating that Jobs seems to possess. :) Flickr! Wants! Yahoo! IDs!
Today Flickr! started requiring Yahoo! accounts. Some of its users got pissed off. What if a couple of years down the road Flickr started asking for money?
Many early internet services were inherently distributed services based on open protocols. I like that. It's a guarantee for independence. In the '90s the slow home connections and the rapid commercialisation of the net instituted the client-server model for 'net services' and consigned the distributed model that services such as email, dns and, indeed, the www to history. Suddenly everything was centralised. The trend continues today under the banner of 'net applications'. Flickr, Gmail, Youtube are just examples of this. In a time when always-on extremely fast broadband connections are (gradually) becoming the norm, perhaps it's time to decentralise once again.
SurfLinks & Spinalonga Downloads
Το cosmix.org τρέχει εδώ και 8 ημέρες σε WordPress 2.1. Oι παρατηρητικοί θα πρόσεξαν πως αυτό σημαίνει πως τρέχει WordPress 2.1 από τη πρώτη στιγμή που κυκλοφόρησε. Το custom theme όπως και τα plugins είναι ευτυχώς — ακόμη — απολύτως συμβατά και η αναβάθμιση έγινε γρήγορα και χωρίς προβλήματα. Επειδή υπάρχει μεγάλος όγκος ενδιαφέροντων links […]
Microsoft attempts to patent core-BlueJ functionality
...And the patent jokes never end.
BlueJ, a free educational Java IDE primarily aimed at students, has contained some innovative debugging features for many years. Features that the largest software developer in the world, Microsoft, blatantly copied (without any attribution) a few years ago in its expensive commercial Visual Studio IDE. But copying was not enough for Microsoft; it would really like to patent them as its own, despite the fact that BlueJ has had them for about 10 years. Ah, let's all cry in unison: 'prior art'. Some of the comments on the linked page are very interesting.
[Update: The Reg reports that the patent application has been withdrawn.]