Techdirt: Recognizing That Just About Any Product Is A Bundle Of Scarce And Non-Scarce Goods
…the producer of that product wants to reduce the costs of what they’re selling, while increasing the value to buyers. One of the easiest ways to do this is to pump up the non-scarce parts of what’s being sold…
Techdirt: Collateral Damage Takedown Victims Start Suing Viacom
While Viacom is busy basking in the glow of its pointless lawsuit against YouTube, its lawyers may be busy on a separate, but related front. Back when the company demanded Google take down certain clips, among the takedown notices were a fair number of videos that the company had no rights over – which of course were still taken down. It’s important to note, however, that when you file a DMCA takedown notice, part of that claim is that you insist you own the rights to that content. It appears that at least some of those who were the victims of this collateral damage are now turning around and suing Viacom for taking their content offline with bogus DMCA claims.
Surprise, surprise.
JRuby has this little trick we call an in-process script that allows launching of a separate JRuby runtime in the same process. … this is what’s currently being done with the Rails Integration (Rails-in-a-war-file) code – a pool of JRuby runtimes preloaded with Rails are used to run the Rails application from a Java servlet.
Nick Sieger — Very nice trick indeed.
A showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scriptsSome look quite handy.
Control.Tabs is a javascript library for creating accessible, flexible & unobtrusive tabbed interfaces in your applications or pages.
Uses Prototype, looks as though it’ll be useful to people using that AJAX library.
Accessible, unobtrusive JavaScript tabs with jQuery
Here is a jQuery plugin that lets you create JavaScript tabs very easily
I like this library quite a lot. It is the one I’m using in Raconteur. This is a link to the first article about the library, there have been several updates, so look towards the bottom of the article to see about them.
Transcript of the March 7 Hearing in SCO v IBM
On this day, we learn from IBM’s attorney, David Marriott that the “mountain of code” SCO’s CEO Darl McBride told the world about from 2003 onward ends up being a measly 326 lines of noncopyrightable code that IBM didn’t put in Linux anyway.
On the other hand, SCO has infringed all 700,000 lines of IBM’s GPL’d code in the Linux kernel.
SCO’s GPL defense is of the lip-curling variety and quite funny. And it’s also quite amusing to watch SCO try to wriggle out of responsibility for all the trash talk its executives treated us to in its PR campaign.
Groklaw — Another nice analysis by Groklaw, followed by the transcript
Here’s what else is new and exciting (or terrible) in money: there is real poverty among the soldiers who fight our wars. There are fist fights to get children into $30,000 a year kindergartens and pre-schools in the right neighborhoods in Manhattan. There are 40 million Americans without health care insurance. There are almost 40 million baby boomers with no savings for retirement. There is a long waiting list for Bentleys at the dealership in Beverly Hills.
by Ben Stein at The American Spectator
Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video...
The point is, face-to-face still matters.
by Kathy SIerra at Creating Passionate Users — Writing about why the SXSW Interactive conference was heavily attended by people developing software that you’d think might make such conferences unnecessary.
At my job, we’re fortunate enough to have the luxury of requiring our clients, in some cases, to use Firefox, and refusing to support Internet Explorer at all. But the reality is, it isn’t a luxury either. This, also, is a powerful competitive advantage – and more so for our clients than for us.
Giles Bowkett — An amusing article describing something for which I have a lot of sympathy.
Say what you mean, mean what you say
Reg [Braithwaite] points out the difficulty of using iterative methods to express underlying intent… This just goes to show that there is simply too much code necessary to solve this simple problem in an imperative fashion. It’s not an indication that the code is poorly written, but rather, that imperative techniques are a bad fit because they obscure the overall intent.
The nested for loop isn’t the goal. The goal is finding the number of employees who have been in the company longer than their department
by Adam Turoff at Notes on Haskell — One of the reasons that Smalltalk and Lisp are so nice, is that their imperative bits are able to express intent quite well. Ruby does okay too, which on the surface is a little surprising… but only on the surface.
Many people will say that it is perfectly logical to limit speeds in order to save gas and produce less polution. But I say that it is perfectly illogical. What you do there is that you pick a target that as a side effect will have the result you’re looking for, but which isn’t it. See, you’re perfectly free to buy an SUV that goes 2km on a liter, and which would use much more gas and pollute much more at 130km/h than more efficient cars would at 220km/h. I’m free to burn as much gas as I want, really, driving alone in my SUV.
Point being, if you want to set a rule about using less gas, you should make a rule about using less gas. You know, like, you can’t use more than 5 liters of gas per person per 100km
by Flemming Funch at Ming the Mechanic — Good point.
Slide design: signal vs. noise (redux)
Mackey’s presentation in Berkeley is a wonderful example of a presentation by an intelligent, personable, and passionate leader that easily could have been insanely great but was not….
Presentation Zen — The article spells out a number of significant improvements that could be made and that could be applied to any presentation.
iGTDbartek:bargiel — Seems to be a nice little todo application based on ideas from Getting Things Done (obviously). I’ve been looking for something with contexts for a while, this is the first that seems to work. Mac OS X.
MainMenuA handy tool for running system maintenance tools from the menu bar. I was using this for a while in the Fall last year but lost it when my machine died an ugly death. Glad I found it again. Mac OS X.
25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part2)There is a lot of stuff in those two tutorials.
Beer Friday: What’s the Best Irish Beer?
And you can’t say Guinness
Dethroner — Yes, I can, actually… ‘Guinness’
ActiontasticAnother context supporting todo list using ideas from Getting Things Done. That’s two today after a long time of looking. I guess I wasn’t looking in the right places.
Savage Chickens: Saint Patrick CartoonGenerally pretty good cartoons. A RSS subscription will get you a new one every day.
Ice created in nanoseconds by Sandia's Z machine
Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. “The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states,” says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. “Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water].”
In the Z experiment, the volume of water shrank abruptly and discontinuously, consistent with the formation of almost every known form of ice except the ordinary kind, which expands. (One might wonder why this ice shrank instead of expanding, given the common experience of frozen water expanding to wreck garden hoses left out over winter. The answer is that only “ordinary” ice expands when water freezes. There are at least 11 other known forms of ice occurring at a variety of temperatures and pressures.)
Does that mean 13 forms of ice?!?
Canada abandoning Guantanamo detainee, lawyers say
“One’s treatment at Guantanamo varies considerably depending on your citizenship,” Ahmad said.
“If you’re British at Guantanamo, you get out. That’s the historical record there. If you’re an American citizen there, you also get out. If you’re Canadian, you languish.”
CBC
From the all round military durability of the Goliathon 83 which can dissolve 7/9ths of an African Elephant in 10 earth seconds to the elegantly futuristic style of the F.M.O.M. Wave Disrupter Gun that issues a conical emission of inverted aether particles, capable of warping and collapsing the very fabric of space (and thereby disintegrating the target subject), these Rayguns are sure to meet the requirements of any aspiring adventurer or explorer.
Very cool.
SXSW Web Awards WinnersWith a link to all the nominees. Certainly something you’ll find interesting here.
