Joho the Blog blogs Isenseuss. Here’s the talk David Isenberg gave at O’Reill eTel. It is, rather amazingly, a disquisition about freedom to connect, done in the style of dr. Seuss.’ …”
Here’s the first stanza, to encourage you to read on…
When Ed Whitacre, the head of AT&T, says,
“They’re not going to use my pipes for free”
he’s not talking about Them, he’s talking about Me.
He’s talking about Us, it should be plain to see.
Slashdot post: A Statistical Review of 1 Billion Web Pages. chrisd writes “As part of a recent examination of the most popular html authoring techniques, my colleague Ian Hickson parsed through a billion web pages from the Google repository to find out what are the most popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. We decided that to publish this would be of significant utility to developers. It’s also a fascinating look into how people create web pages. For instance one thing that surprised me was that the < title > is more popular than …” “The graphs in the report require a browser with SVG and CSS support (like Firefox 1.5!). Enjoy!”
The study by Google has some interesting conclusions, like this one from the page on the body tag:
One conclusion one can draw from the spread of attributes used on the body element is that authors don’t care about what the specifications say. Of these top twenty attributes, nine are completely invalid, and five have been deprecated for nearly eight years, half the lifetime of the Web so far.
Where does all this bad code come from? Are individual authors writing junk in Notepad and vim, or are large commercial sites using bad HTML, augmented with lots of Javascript and CSS tricks to try to render some cross-browser effect they can’t do through the standards? A few answers are on their page on Editors, but this is mostly a survey that indicates there’s need for more study.
Linux-Watch.com asks “What’s up with Novell’s new licensing?” with some interesting numbers on Novell and Red Hats subscription numbers.
New Hampshire House Representatives Sam A. Cataldo and Roy D. Maxfield have sponsored a bill to establish a study committee to determine if state agencies should have to consider Open Source alternatives when obtaining software. Should choice be mandatory? I think so. No business case should be presented claiming that alternatives have been considered if they haven’t.
Over at Linux-Watch.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks: Is Wine really faster than Windows? and comes up with the right answer: It doesn’t really matter.
Now here’s a silly headline: OSNews purports that Linux Users May Be Violating Sarbanes-Oxley. A brief read of the article will tell you that a corporation is likely violating its obligations to its shareholders if it is failing to audit, track, monitor and closely examine the copyright, license and patent requirements of ALL of the products they use. There may be just as much liability from the shareware, freeware, postcardware and every-ware installed willy-nilly inside a company. Developers, consultants, IT personnel and users are notorious for bringing in a little utility from home on floppy, USB tab or download and spreading it around the office. It may be that the Fortune 500 is liable for thousands of postcards for EditPad as well.
The solution is to follow the law, even one as obnoxious as SOX (and complain to your legislator if this is burdensome), with an audit and a compliance plan. The inflamatory headline that “Linux users are bringing chaos to the world” is just insulting. Any company using software needs to do their best to ensure they are not violating copyright, patents or licenses. No news here, move along.
Over at Shedding Some Light, Rick Schummer blogs Breaking another rule costs me “Here is another one of those rules I have learned the hard way:
Never test install your application installer on your development machine.
Cool at the MacBook is, Bill says he’ll be waiting a while before he buys his: Free Software for Intel-based Macs. “I’ve been considering getting a new MacBook Pro – the specs are very nice, it’s a real desktop replacement, and even though there are some weird things like a slower DVD drive and a lower-res screen it would be a good computer… But there’s one thing that’s ruled it out…”
[Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth]
InfoWorld: Top News: Oracle releases quarterly security patches. Imagine only having to release patches four times a year!
New mac patches today: my iMac greeted me with a slew of patches today: QuickTime, iTunes, iPod and Mac OS X. The security patch readme includes:
The 10.4.4 Update delivers overall improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users.
It includes fixes for:
“For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n302810 … For detailed information on Security Updates, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798. ”
Get patching!