"As we've always suspected, the less time you spend in American schools, the more likely you are to hold on to some semblance of the civic morality which Nanny struggled to beat into your thick skull during your blissful years in the nursery.

Thus it comes as no surprise that forty-five per cent of US college graduates should believe that downloading copyrighted material without paying for it is not really stealing, whereas only twenty-five per cent of Americans who have not completed high school would agree, according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project."

"By far the two most common types of fonts currently used on the Web are the serif font, Times New Roman (TNR) and the sans serif font, Arial. The question is, which one is more legible and at which size? In the past, it has been determined that serif fonts, which have ornamental strokes at the tip and base of each letter, are easier to read on paper than sans serif fonts, which do not have serifs. This is because it is believed that serifs help distinguished each individual letter (Albers, 1963). However, this benefit may be reduced or even eliminated on computer screens because of their display particularities, like poorer screen resolution and aliasing or "jaggies," as it is commonly known."

"Researchers have cloned six successive generations of mice in an experiment that gives new insights into ageing. The sequentially cloned mice showed no signs of growing old prematurely and appeared mentally and physically normal.

However, the experiment came to a sudden end when the single, sixth-generation mouse clone was eaten by her foster mother."

"How could a Ralph Nader story be interesting? He has been turned into the national scold, just as I am referred to as a "gadfly." I assume that's because intellectual is too difficult a word to spell. He has been made the bore of all time. Even I, who quite admire him in some ways, find him very boring. But he's not boring; he's presented as a bore, as a nag. Seat belts! I'm here in New York, and every time I get into a taxicab these voices come on that say "buckle up," I think of Ralph Nader. Now this has destroyed him! You have made him the bore of all time.

It's all about getting rid of anybody who wants change, and you create an aura about him. I've been demonized for 50 years, I'm aware of how it's done."

"Hackers quickly figured out the simple base64+XOR system used to scramble the CueCat's output, and wrote a Linux device driver for the scanner. Others launched web sites that could read the cat's output. Another programmer pitched in with a decoder written in skintight Perl code. Nevada engineer Stephen Satchell published a detailed analysis of the barcode cues themselves, and a Wisconsin hardware hacker physically dissected his CueCat and discovered a way to neuter the device's electronic serial number with a careful slice of an X-Acto knife. "The serial EPROM is easily accessible," said Michael Guslick. "By cutting one of the traces, that effectively disables the serial number."

Digital Convergence was aghast. "If people take over our cat and start using their own databases, the world becomes cloudy," says Mathews. "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online."

By way of example, Mathews points to one hack, created by network engineer Michael Rothwell, that allows users to scan the ISBN number on the back of a book with the CueCat. "You could swipe a code, and it would serve up a page on Amazon.com. But what if [the publisher] doesn't want it to go to Amazon.com, they want it to go to web site under their control... By the Linux community taking over and redirecting where these swipes go to, they were circumventing our software.""

"Just days after About.com releases email address of some of their business customers, Digital Convergence alerts customers to a possible security breach with their CueCat scanner. The breach includes possible release of emails and names of those who registered the CueCat (which is given away for free at RadioShack Stores). Apparently the CueCat security has been de-clawed."

"Just as technology has made leaps and bounds over those last two years, plans for the download and release of Conspiracy Of One are significantly more sophisticated. Anyone who purchases the actual CD will have the opportunity to use proprietary new technology, located directly on the physical compact disc, to launch into a coded part of the band web site and become a member of The Offspring Nation. The Offspring Nation is a digital fan club offering incentives and benefits including subsequent exclusive downloads, animated films, gated chats with the artist, advance ticket sales and more. Dexter Holland says, "We decided that we would create a super fan club for those of our fans who actually buy our CD. The CD has a key in the CD-Extra section that registers members to The Offspring Nation, our fan club. We figure since we make our music available to everyone for free this will act as a special acknowledgement to our fans who go to the trouble to buy our CD.""

"In the nine months since it filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against MP3.com (MPPP), Universal Music Group has said over and over again that it is battling the online music portal to protect the financial interests of its legendary stable of performers. After it said as much in court papers, a federal judge ordered MP3.com to pay Universal between $120 million and $250 million in damages on Sept. 6.

But Universal recording artists will never see a dime of that cash, one of the label's most prominent musicians, Courtney Love, now says. And so, the Grammy Award-winning singer says she will turn the tables on Universal and ask a court to fine the company for stealing her music. "

"This project is a stand alone MP3 player, designed for home, car, or portable use. It plays a group of MP3 files stored on a standard or laptop IDE hard disk drive... hundreds of hours using even today's low-cost drives. The firmware is available under the GPL, for anyone who want to really customize the player. High quality audio output is provided by a 24 bit DAC, using both standard line-level outputs and an amplified headphone output. The large capacity allows the use of very high MP3 quality settings, that would reduce flash based players to only a few songs. Because it's a complete stand alone player usable in a variety of applications, you can have your entire MP3 music collection anywhere away from your computer. "

"Last November, as reported in Google likes directory sites, I discovered that Google had the uncanny ability to sniff out high-quality, but little-known directory sites. As I discussed in that article, Google was able to do this because it ranks sites according to how many people make links to them, and smart people everywhere learn that directories are important, so they make many links to them. Now, however, I've found solid evidence that Google's new alliances, especially the pact with Yahoo! that was announced in June, seem to have compromised its ability to find directories."

"Standards like XML and SOAP make it easier for systems to make remote procedure calls across the Internet. For example, corporate systems will allow customers to make calls that check real-time inventory levels. Your car's navigation system will check local traffic reports when planning the quickest route. These are all "services". This site helps you find services that are publicly accessible."

oreilly network rss moves forward
oreilly network writing rss 1.0
oreilly network rss delivers the xml promise
davenet what to do about rss?

This note describes a project for describing & retrieving (digitized) photos with (RDF) metadata. It describes the RDF schemas, a data-entry program for quickly entering metadata for large numbers of photos, a way to serve the photos and the metadata over HTTP, and some suggestions for search methods to retrieve photos based on their descriptions.

The data-entry program has been implemented in Java, a specific Jigsaw frame has been done to retrieve the RDF from the image through HTTP. The RDF schema uses the Dublin Core schema as well as additional schemas for technical data.

"The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project--one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.

As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions--to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media--will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration."

"In sum, SOAP provides a web-aware alternative to current object protocols like CORBA. It has a low cost of deployment and is supported by software right now. It still has issues to face in terms of interoperability, security, and description/discovery infrastructure.

RDF implements a computer-readable alternative to current web knowledge representation applications (i.e., HTML). It faces some immediate challenges in terms of intelligibility and immediate business uses are less than certain. In the long run, though, it presents the opportunity to transform the way the web is used.

Looking at the big picture, one can envisage SOAP and RDF operating in a complementary manner in the Web of the future. RDF-based technology can provide directory information to describe and locate SOAP services. SOAP could carry RDF graphs in between RDF aggregation services, or provide a "virtual graph" service from a provider like Amazon.com.

Both SOAP and RDF have a part to play in my dream of a totally integrated future. However, they also point to the need for some very significant work, only just getting started, on agreeing upon XML vocabularies and semantics. That is a hard problem, one which I expect will never be totally solved, and may cause us to develop the best "nearly-there" solutions we can, to continue getting the most out of the Web."

"There are many other data models which RDF's Directed Labelled Graph (DLG) model compares closely with, and maps onto. This page is written with the intention of enumerating the similarity and diferences between the models, to indicate how the mapping might be done and what extra information muast be added in the process. Where the other models are related to previous unmet promises of computer science, now passed into folk law as unsolvable problems, they suggest a fear that the goal of a Semantic Web is inappropriate.

One consistent difference between the Semantic Web and many data models for programming langauges is the "closed world assumption"."

"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM. Similarly, the first portable computers came from now-dead companies like Osborne Computer. Today we use portables primarily from such companies as Dell and IBM. Or consider the ubiquitous Palm-Pilot. It was hardly the first to market, lagging years behind early leaders Sharp and -- in particular -- Apple, with its high-profile Newton MessagePad."

"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change."

"happyNETbox will very shortly be a open platform, open development browser assistant and information management system."

"While there will be some functionality overlap with my former company's product, Deepleap, this is an entirely new code base based on different technology, and with a different focus. This is not Deepleap, version 2. This is something new."

"I've begun to notice a variation on Open Source, where people share code, which I'm going to call Open Blueprint, where people share plans and ideas for creating companies."

"It's just like the open source process, but it's not code I'm creating: it's a company blueprint. I get patches from all over. I get a few wrong, dumb patches from people who suggest that I should pay everybody what they demand, which I don't add to my blueprint. I get a lot of bug fixes, like the person who gracefully pointed out that I misspelled both Torvalds and Stroustrup. I get a lot of smart discussion about the hard questions, like equality within levels. I apply the patches that are good and ignore the ones that aren't with a polite "thanks for sharing".

Not a lot of companies have their compensation policies on the web. (ArsDigita does). In fact most companies seem to make it a secret; telling other people what your salary is can be a firing offense. That's outrageous. Fog Creek is an Open Blueprint company: the "code" for running our company is up there for anyone to see, copy, enhance, and tweak."

"When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year in college because they had never learned how to study? It's a common trap. A friend of mine calls it "the curse of the gifted" -- a tendency to lean on your native ability too much, because you've always been rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.

You are a brilliant implementor, more able than me and possibly (I say this after consideration, and in all seriousness) the best one in the Unix tradition since Ken Thompson himself. As a consequence, you suffer the curse of the gifted programmer -- you lean on your ability so much that you've never learned to value certain kinds of coding self-discipline and design craftsmanship that lesser mortals *must* develop in order to handle the kind of problem complexity you eat for breakfast."

"But you make some of your more senior colleagues nervous. See, we've seen the curse of the gifted before. Some of us were those kids in college. We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due -- the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your native talent alone doesn't cut it any more. The smarter you are, the longer it takes to hit that crunch point -- and the harder the adjustment when you finally do. And we can see that *you*, poor damn genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising."

"I used to worry about what would happen if Linus got hit by a truck. With all respect, I still worry about what will happen if the complexity of the kernel exceeds the scope of your astonishing native talent before you grow up."