noibl

> You can see that his system has its restrictions too as he enters a pixel based headline size in the demo video.

The fact that he specifies the size unit actually suggests that the system would accept others. It's basically CSS after all.

There's nothing ironic about it. It's on the first page of Bing too. If you read the first line of what you linked to, you'll see that it has nothing to do with Google enforcing its patent rights.

I wonder if they'll decide to do a shakedown on Bing for using the patented PageRank method? Again, probably not.

> So they wouldn't have attempted to get patent fees out of Apple, RIM and anyone making Windows Phone devices?

I believe that's what I implied.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22google+sues%22+patent

Do you have some reason to think otherwise apart from that it would be bad business sense in your opinion?

> let's not pretend that Google were trying to do any different.

Let's not pretend that Google were trying to do something other than: buy a way to tax hardware makers who choose to run a competitor's OS?

Sometimes patents are defensive.

> Chrome 14 should be stable in about 8-10 weeks. Firefox 8 won't be stable until 14-16 weeks from now.

This almost-gripe is such a beautiful illustration of how far we've come in upping the pace of browser tech innovation. Thank you Mozilla (for this round).

We're not talking about a mere monopoly, we're talking about exclusive API integrations in, hypothetically, an OS with majority market share. That's not something that has historically been tolerated well by courts.

  Google has a social network and a [mobile] operating system.
  Who’s going to have the best mobile social user experience?

While this is an attractive bet, as Google you would have to hope that neither your OS or network got too popular or you could quickly end up in anti-trust territory. Android being open-source changes things slightly but it doesn't solve your competitors' problem (deep integration access to your own stock devices).

  Zynga’s IPO filing shows $597.5M in revenue and $90.6M in earnings 
  in 2010. If Facebook had around $2B in revenue and $250 million in 
  earnings in 2010, and 99% of Zynga’s revenue comes from Facebook, 
  the math says Zynga could be nearly a third of of FB’s top and 
  bottom line.

That's some funny accounting.

  $1 invested in Google (at a $167B market cap) will make it to $2 
  before $1 invested in Facebook (at $80B market cap) makes it to $2.

That's not so funny.

It's because of limited upload bandwidth when sending multiple copies of a stream.

There is a 'Preview (Dense)' variant of the theme which does exactly this. It's still not as dense as before but I'm finding that to be a good thing.

I like this one a lot better than the classic which had way too much intrusive background colour.

> The way a lot of devs work, whether you like it or not, is to find a feature from the web that solves their problem, put it in their code and test it on their current browser. If it works then they're happy.

It's not a matter of whether I like it, it's a matter of whether those people remain employed. It would be ridiculous to hold off on new features until they're fully supported just because of the unprofessionalism of some enterprise web devs.

> Probably the bigget thing they can do here is to not introduce "experimental" features, and then tweak them over time.

See, what we're talking about here in practice is the web standards development process. Currently it is collaborative and driven by experimentation, dialogue and feedback from the field. It has proven to be immensely successful in assuring cross-browser compatibility. What you're suggesting instead is a traditional software development approach where any relevant standards are either already nailed down, proprietary or made irrelevant by monopoly. This may have worked for Microsoft in the past. It's not going to work now.

> As enterprises have shown, you can stick with the same major version of a browser for years

As the article points out, it is only really true of IE -- the 'enterprise-friendly' browser -- that feature updates are accompanied by major version change. It's somewhat disingenuous to generalise that to 'a browser' when most browser makers have found that release model to be inadequate and their growing market share bears them out.

> w/o any degredation in the core business.

There's a conflation here, by enterprise, between browser-as-client for in-house apps and browser-as-web-browser. If your test for degradation is that the in-house apps continue to work then sure, that's verifiable. But if you acknowledge that the same program is used for both purposes then you would find it much harder to show that no degradation of user experience and productivity have occurred.

---

I personally think the success or failure of the rolling release model with separate streams for early adopters depends entirely on the QA standards of the vendor. Google has shown that with stringent QA, this model can help greatly in catching bugs before the mainstream user is exposed to them. This is what inspires the confidence that allows people to accept silent push updates. If Mozilla can be as effective in quarantining bugs before general release then they will earn the same level of trust. But if they're not able to keep major bugs out of the limelight using this process, it's going to be extremely counterproductive. I worry that they're just not militant enough about QA to make this work.

Let's keep this tangent short but, so what? It doesn't mean we need to be blinkered about what the gradual relegation of English as tech lingua franca might mean for non-anglophones. Do we really need to be in a minority to be interested in remote perspectives?

I think you're missing the significance of this change. It's not clearly stated in the announcement (in fact, nothing is) but in section 1.3 of the Applicant Guidebook[1] it shows that for the first time it will be possible to have IDN gTLDs, that is, gTLDs in any standardised script. Latin1 is gone. This is big.

Sometimes the anglocentrism (and USA-centrism) on this site worries me.

[1] http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/rfp-clean-30may11-e...

If, as is hinted, they restrict this to SERPs that carry one canonical result, such as 'facebook login' or -cough- 'html5 spec', it could be a great thing. If after some interval you do the same search and again click the top result, Chrome might even start redirecting you there straight from the omnibox. But if they apply this technique too broadly it's going to be a big drain on server resources and sites would probably start using visibilityState* to lazy load their stuff.

* Thanks for that link, abarth

From the images in the video, the blogging from last year and the fate of previous missions, it seems likely that a major factor in the shutdown was dust on the solar panels[1] which combined with low-light winter conditions to compromise the health of the electronics when they could no longer be heated. Future rovers may be able to self-clean the panels[1], giving a much longer theoretical lifespan (at least for this component).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_event

[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...

> I personally loath meta answers like "why are you doing X and asking Y" instead of wasting the equivalent typing of explaining why X and Y is a bad idea.

That's funny; I'm more often annoyed by the second response because often X and Y are only generally bad, not universally bad. Even though the supportee should probably have an up-front justification, it's reasonable to check for one and avoid handing out an unfair critique.

  A little note for you Experts out there. Don’t take 
  yourself too seriously; We are all here to learn and 
  grow. Coddle the dumb ones and challenge the smart ones.

If you consider the ratio of expertise to ignorant questions you'll see that this is really bad advice. Experts, even when they dabble in Q&A, are not by definition tutors. It's unfair to expect that whole category of people to waste their own time and the time of people with smart questions by 'coddling' those who fail to grasp this fact. When dealing with people who are clearly overreaching their current capabilities, or who ask 'how' questions without any interest in the 'why', giving them the cold shoulder and an invitation to gather more background knowledge from published resources is often the best service that can be done.

Another factor in support fatigue among open source software experts is the (often inept) commercial application of the software, which is commonly associated with a lack of respect for the software itself and for those who have deep knowledge of it. Then* you get questions paired with criticism like 'I know exactly how to do this in Y, why can't stupid X behave the way I want?' or insistent pleading like 'I need to get this working ASAP! Please halp!'. When the intent behind the question is not to learn but to make money faster, volunteers support 'staff' are not obliged to step up.

Anyway, advising experts in general to change the way they volunteer time and information is pointless. They know what works for them and there are no levers on IRC to make them change their habits.

PS, config help on #apache? What network is that? :)

* I know, not only then.

> Follow the channel for little time before asking anything.

Related: an IRC stream is always conversation of sorts and, for humans, there is only enough bandwidth for a few voices at a time to be heard. If three people have just asked questions or there are multiple ongoing discussions, it might be wise to wait until things quiet down a bit.

Shame on me; I did forget Tunisia. I don't see anything to do with the internet in the events in Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. The mobile network has played some part in Libya though. In any case, none of these governments have been 'toppled' and especially have not been replaced by democratic ones.

The fiber tap story, for reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156

We should civilize this internet thing before life gets any weirder.

Nah:

1. Not so much 'leaking' as 'hoarding'... the dripfeed of leaks is mainly from the single cables dump (a non-renewable resource). Nearly every major organisation? I don't think so.

2. I'm guessing you mean Egypt, where the military has indeed appointed a new cabinet. Not sure that counts as 'toppling' but we'll see, come September. That accounts for the 'right', who's left?

3. Yes we have an organised collective of vigilante hckers exposing the hypocrisy and corruption of other hckers, much as has always been done. Two differences now: (a) national governments have started outsourcing to the second group more and also hyping the word 'cyber', leading to (b) the public has started to become mildly amused by these skirmishes.

4. Interesting configuration of actors there. For those in Europe or America, the interesting part of alleged Chinese hacking is the unwanted free transfer of lucrative IP, which is to say trade secrets. But the US government already has behind-the-scenes access to a vast amount of global internet traffic so any large scale spying effort on its part wouldn't need to be so overt as would that of, say, China. And China is certainly not alone in facing these allegations.[1]

5. Aaand back to 3.

[1] http://www.dbune.com/news/business/3370-france-accused-of-be...

How would you translate the verb 'appartenir' then?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW5Z6T9Azyg#t=10m47s

Disappointed in jwz's choice of punchbowl metaphor. Seriously, why would you call your format Web Pee? Then there's Web 'Emm..', soon no doubt to be followed by Web 'Eh?' (because 'music' also starts with m, guys).

  'Did you know? WebP is pronounced "weppy".'[1]

No. And it isn't.

...It's the little things.

[1] http://code.google.com/speed/webp/

I wouldn't say that non-attendance of a geopolitical summit means Doctorow is abstaining from the public debate. Part of the responsibility of people who care about the internet as a platform for free speech is to avoid unduly privileging the preferred broadcast channels of governing elites.

Great post. Worth bearing in mind that it is a government (more than one, in fact) that is involved, not a country.

Apparently Sarkozy now employs Orwell's ghost as a speechwriter:

- "You have a tremendous responsibility that weighs upon you, ... The responsibility has to be shared between you and us."

- "behind the anonymous Internet user there is a real citizen ... and a nation to which he or she belongs"

It defies parody.

Nice to see a member of the Chromium team posting on the WebKit blog. Time to change the name from "Surfin' Safari" to "Webloggin' WebKit"? :)

Re 'Firebug-driven-tweaks flow' [Sorry if this is OT]

With Stylebot when you make these kinds of tweaks it builds up a supplementary ruleset in a single location that you can afterwards copy and transfer to your CSS file. With Firebug it's relatively tricky to make sure you transfer all the tweaks you just did. Feature request. :)

  > The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax 
    forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the 
    organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors

It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one.

s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with.

Edit: I think I understood the rationale but it's blinkered. It's Google's business to find out why such transitions are difficult or unattractive to users and to smooth the way. To answer your question, why sync, an example is data portability. While most computer users have never heard the term, they do have an intuitive understanding of the kinds of problems that can happen when you don't have a local copy of your stuff, as almost happened with the Google Video screw-up. Whether problems like this are real or permanent isn't the most relevant fact, it's that people experience them.

I think the GDrive cancellation in particular highlights a real problem at Google: the tendency to have a much clearer idea of what they want users to be doing than of what users want to do.

Generic cloud storage could be a great bridge between the way the vast majority of people are used to working with data (as files) and the plethora of online services that can make that data useful in (to the user) unforeseen ways. But because the Google future is so dazzling, it's not enough to step into it. One must leap.

Donations are not an alternative to chatter though and charity hijacking is nothing new. 'Don't' is not an alternative to anything and 'abuse' is subjective, as is 'emergency' incidentally. #jan25 was many things to many people.

CB is bandwidth-limited and provides few options for resource discovery in comparison to the internet.

In case it's not clear, what I'm saying is that it's the responsibility of broadcasters, guerrilla or otherwise, to find effective uses for the communication tools at hand.