I take a skeptical view of this demand from the EU that Google change out streetview pictures every six months rather than every 12:
Currently, Google holds Street View images for a year but the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has said the search engine must chop this in half, as 12 months is a "disproportionate" length of time.
If there's a privacy issue, I fail to see how 12 months would be bad, but six months would be ok. This looks an awful lot like a way to raise Google's costs to me.
I woke up this morning to an interesting thing - no USB drives (I have three attached) were showing on my Mac's desktop. I remembered that last night, when I was unhooking from the wired to wireless network (to move the Mac to the living room), the three drives wouldn't unmount - they stayed grayed for eons before I just gave up and unplugged the usb hub. I got the standard "you didn't eject" dialog, which I ignored, having seen it before.
My guess was that the service that handles that crashed, but Googling didn't turn up much - it seems a lot of people had USB issues with Tiger, but nothing relevant to me showed up. So.... I just rebooted. That cleared the problem, but I still wish I knew which service was involved - I likely could have just restarted it.
Slashdot reports on the DRM for Assassin's Creed 2 - apparently, if you don't have a working connection, it'll just stop working. Never mind all of the obvious issues with this from the consumer end (what if your ISP has an issue?) - what about the brittleness this introduces on the back end?
Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.
While it may be harder to circumvent, it sure will be easy to tick off users. Say the servers have a problem - then every game owner is SOL. Say a DDOS attack is launched on those servers? In a way, the vendor has painted a target on themselves. I won't be a bit surprised if a few black hats take aim at it.
Going back to the client side for a moment, I see my XBox dropping offline fairly regularly for small amounts of time. Usually it's after it's been unused for a bit, but sometimes it just drops right in the middle of a game - I know this because the XBox notifies me. If I had Assassin's Creed 2, such periodic drops (and cuts from the game) would get to be really, really annoying. My desire to buy the game just about fell off a cliff.
The good news is, we can see tsunamis coming now. The bad news is, other than getting to high ground, there's not a lot you can do about a tsunami. For the rest of us who are not (directly) affected, there's live streaming available - that's certainly new. Interesting times we live in...
This week's podcast is a chat with Tudor Girba, one of the driving forces behind the Glamour project. To get an idea as to what Glamour is, here's Tudor's description:
Browsers are specific of user interfaces focused on exposing and manipulating data, and Glamour is a Smalltalk-based engine for building such browsers. Approached traditionally, building browsers becomes expensive. Glamour's abstractions lowers this cost significantly and brings the power of browsers in the hands of every Smalltalk programmer.
Glamour was mainly developed by Philipp Bunge, Tudor Girba, Lukas Renggli with contributions from Jorge Ressia and David Roethlisberger. Glamour is currently built in Pharo, it is available under the MIT license, and it is an important part of the Moose analysis platform.
More information about it can be found on the official page.
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I'm on my way to London - today's entertainment is a long wait at JFK for the outbound flight. I did manage to find a bookstore with a modest selection; had I been thinking, I would have hit Amazon earlier last week. Anyway, I do have wifi, and I think I'm tired enough to sleep.
Of course, this does mean a week without Dragon Age
:)
Dare Obasanjo makes some great points about why we get on "achievement treadmills", and asks some great questions about them:
What it really boils down to is that I traded one set of achievement treadmills (i.e. blogging and contributing to an Open Source project) for another more explicit set (i.e. playing Modern Warfare 2). Now we can go back to Alex Payne s tweet and find out where I disagree. From the perspective of Infinity Ward (creators of MW2) is it a bad thing for their business that they ve created a game that has sucked me into almost 300 hours of play time? On the other hand, is it a good thing for me as a fully functioning member of society to have cut down my contributions to an Open Source project and the blogosphere to play a video game? Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time?
While MW2 didn't suck me in that much (I played it, finished it, and am pretty much done), Dragon Age is a whole other kettle of fish - and I've certainly racked up a stupendous amount of time playing it. Some of it really is the satisfaction of unlocking various achievements (the game has multiple paths you can take through it, including character interactions). I'm sure that I've spent less time on, say, my Facebook interface (and BottomFeeder) as a result. Is that bad? So long as it's not interfering with my actual work and personal life, I'm not sure :)
A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside" is available from Lulu. The printed book is identical with the online and the PDF version of the book.
Consider the insanity of what's going in in the UK - open WiFi is being effectively banned, because all hotspot owners are going to be required to keep logs (as if they were ISPs) of all accesses. Right - because on the super-fast (cough) connections at the typical coffee shop, I'm sure that tons of pirating is going on:
"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.
"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe"
The stated goals - prevention of copyright infringement - just make no sense. The big pirating is simply not happening on open WiFi hotspots. What's next - a rule that all users of a hotspot (even a home one) need to be registered?
That's pretty cool - you can buy a ticket for the Heathrow Express (a train that runs from Heathrow straight into Paddington station) right at the departure gate at JFK. Way, way cheaper than the cab ride would have been (I looked at the map, and it would have cost a bundle). It's about 3 miles from there to my hotel though, so I either need another subway ride from there, or a short cab ride. I'd walk, but my shoulder bag would kill me over that distance - never mind the exhausted state I'm likely to be in at that time of day :)
A Mac mini with HDMI. Makes sense, right? Well, it hasn't to Apple so far, but it looks like it just might be ready to change its tune. That's according to AppleInsider, at least, which has it from "two people familiar with the matter" that prototypes of a Mac mini with an HDMI port have been seen making the rounds in the usual inner circles.
If that's more than a rumor, then the next generation mini might well make sense as a digital hub.
Here's an interesting side effect of the recent tragedy in Chile - the day just got shorter:
The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second)," Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. "The axis about which the Earth"s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).
So if you're a little too tired at your next meeting...
We're in London today, and we'll be in Paris on Thursday - you can register for the event, or just come to the Mercure Paris Terminus Nord - our event will run from 9 AM to 1 PM (local time), but we'll be there with breakfast out by 8 AM. We have a full program for you - come on out!
It's official: HBO has given a green light to a 10-episode series based on George R.R. Martin's fantasy series Game of Thrones and released the first image from the show
The big question though: will book five ever appear?
In a completely boneheaded move, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that they want to set up a system to charge people who tweet any part of song lyric.
Why yes, 140 characters promoting music is just bad. I'd ask if the music industry could get stupider, but I'm kind of afraid to find out...
Today's screencast is a brief overview of the steps involved in setting up a Cincom Smalltalk based blog server using Silt, a web toolkit based application server that has been in production for over 7 years.
Click to Play
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Today's event in Paris is going well except for one small thing - it's 37 (f) outside, and there's no heat in the room we are in. Thank goodness for the heat emissions from the laptops :)
I guess you could lose an iPhone or Touch the same way - cheap wifi finders can be used to track down an active device - PCWorld reports:
A statement by the mobile security software vendor highlighted a recent warning from a security specialist at University of Technology, in Jamaica. He said that it appeared crooks running a lottery scam on the island were using stolen laptops to do so. They tracked down the often out-of-sight computers using Wi-Fi radio detectors.
And the cost for such trackers is $50 or less, so it's not like there's a high bar to entry. Sobering...
We've had a good event so far (Georg is finishing his talk as I write this) - here are a few snapshots from the day - but first, if you want to hear our wrapup from the event, we'll be on ustream at 7:30 AM EST talking about it. The pics:
Travel day tomorrow - walk to the train station, 40 minutes to CDG, hop to London, take a plane from there to NY, then wait a few hours, fly to Baltimore. Then get a cab. So it truly will be a day of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles :)
The network announced today that it has ordered a 10th season of the young Superman series.
The entire Kandor thread makes no sense, Luthor is out of focus, and by now, the name "Superman" would never get used - "The Blur" would be what happened. The writers don't know when to stop...
"Yes, we intend to do so," PR rep Tony Fox told THR. "My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem."
Right.... because a couple of minutes of either show is likely to discourage viewing. By that logic, they should stop running ads, since they're only likely to discourage viewing, too. Morons.
I agree with Alain Reynaud that seventeen years is way, way too long a time period for a software patent, but I think seven years (his proposed interval) is also too long:
The problem, you see, is their length. Seventeen years of monopoly is an eternity in Internet time. Instead, software patents should only be valid for seven years.
Seven Years ago we didn't have Twitter or Facebook - which means that a patent (like the newsfeed one Facebook wants) would still be around (if granted today) in 2016 - still an eternity in internet terms.
No, I have a more radical notion: no software patents, period. Let competition take care of the problem. Big companies won't "rull the roost" under such a system; as happens right now, they'll still mostly go the M&A route to innovate. What would disappear is patent trolls.
Word from Apple is out -- so get your credit cards ready. The iPad will be launching on Saturday April 3rd (and on the shelves, er... display tables at Apple retail stores), but you'll be able to plunk down cold, hard cash for it in just a week. Pre-orders will begin on March 12th for the US version (non-3G) for that April street date, with the 3G version coming in late April
I suspect we'll be in that pre-order queue - my wife has expressed a pretty keen interest in this device :)
Mariano Martinez Peck will administrate the joint application supported by Janko Mivšek. They need to supply Google with information about ESUG as a mentoring organisation and a list of ideas/projects, each with a description and a nominated mentor. If their submission get selected by Google they will be told how many projects Google will sponsor — the mentor receives $500 and the student who volunteers to work on the projects will receive $4500.
The deadline to get projects included is March 12; follow the link for full details.
:)
