Since switching to Mozilla, I have become a fan(atic) of tabbed browsing. I had been enjoying the MDI interface of Opera, too, for the speed and variety, adn still think that has the advantage of actually being able to look at more than one windows at a time. In this blog entry, David Hyatt, who coded the tabbed interface for Mozilla and two other browsers, discusses some of the interface design decisions that had to be made.
Archive | March, 2003
Who can be opposed to a BALANCE act?
Lofgren Introduces BALANCE Act to Modify DMCA [Slashdot]
Infonaut writes “Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D – CA) introduced H.R. 1066, The Balance Act. It seeks to clarify ‘that America’s historic principles of fair use – protected under Section 107 of the Copyright Act – apply to analog and digital transmissions.’ Apparently Lessig is on board, as are several associations and other organizations. If you like what you see, encourage your representative to support the bill.”
SCO sues IBM for IP infringement
Doc Searls interviews some of the players and provides an explanation for what SCO is up to, in suing IBM, in this Linux Journal article.
World of Ends
Two of the bad boys who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto – Doc Searls and David Weinberger – are at it again. World of Ends is their next set of clues to the rest of us, especially the blockheads. Check it out.
March 26th: Boston Area FoxPro User Group
Boston FUG, March 26th: Application Development and Data over the internet. The Boston Area FoxPro User Group meets the fourth Wednesday of nearly every month at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA, 6 PM – 9 PM. Open to the public. For directions and more information, visit the group homepage. Subscribe or read the meeting announcements by clicking here. Wednesday, March 26, 6-7 PM: “Application Development Strategies: Final acceptance criteria, sign off, future enhancements. ” 7 – 9 PM: Guy Pardoe discusses how a VFP application can use a data source located anywhere on the Internet with the use of West-Wind Web Connect. Demonstrations will include the use of VFP and SQL Server backends. [FoxCentral.Net]
FoxForum Wiki RSS Feed Alpha Test Ends
Due to connectiviity issues, I’ve stopped trying to sample the FoxForum wiki. I can’t tell if there’s some problem with my connection, or if the server is refusing my connections. Ah, well, on to other things…
Update: Owner Steven Black posted a message that the site is down due to a failed router or server at his office. He’s off on a skiing vacation this week and next, so we’re wiki-less for the duration. Bummer.
VFP 8.0 EULA: Craig Folds
In his latest blog, Craig decides that Microsoft is right in enforcing their upgrade rights. I still think it is nonsense. The only people entitled to the upgrade are those who probably don’t need it, since they aren’t supporting previous deployments of FoxPro.
I think the upgrade discount ought to be a reward for loyalty to previous owners. I think the change in EULA is Microsoft’s way of extracting more revenue from their customer base. They’ve done really well at this, keeping up their revenues in a period where nearly all high-tech businesses have reported a downturn. But they are doing it at a cost to their customer base.
Finally, the real problem I have with the EULA is that Microsoft slip-streamed it in, and didn’t alert their customers that there was a license change they needed to be aware of. That was a violation of trust.
I had resolved to purchase a copy this time around, despite the seven MSDN subscriptions, past and present, and the many existing copies of VFP I own, as a means of communicating to Microsoft, in the language that they best understand ($$$) that VFP was an important product I wanted to see continued. I chose to purchase a full version, to avoid any question about my rights to use every version of VFP I need to support my customers. But I am not happy about the damage they are doing, once again, to their loyal VFP customer base.
Information Wants To Be Free. For a Price.
“Ah yes, Free. Nobody who’s been awake online for more than five minutes can have missed Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, “information wants to be free”. What he said next is just as important, for all it gets forgotten: “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better”
— Rupert Goodwin’s commentary on ZDNet.uk. Read more here
Will firms balk at Microsoft’s program?
What a great question! Asked in this c|net news.com article about the new InfoPath program, a tool for integrating Office documents. That Microsoft is considering Office as a “platform” for development is no surprise to us who have used the Developer’s Kit for the last three or four versions. However, Micrososoft has had many tried-and-failed attempts with “Office-as-a-canvas,” non-document-centric interfaces. One of these times they’ll get it right.
Yet another article on RSS and news readers
The Washington Post has this article. “…I have been testing a promising new breed of software that is helping me on the daily news hunt. Called “news readers,” these programs fetch headlines and site summaries from hundreds of Web sites I preselect and present all the information in one spot on my computer desktop.”
Everyone seems to be covering RSS and news readers. The question is whether someone will come out with the “killer app” that “crosses the chasm” or if it is just another interesting technology that fades into a niche. I’m not one to predict (I poured all my time, money and effort into Amiga), but it will be fun to see how it plays out.