What if..

Stephen O’Grady: “[W]hat if supporting Linux was easier than it is today? What if, for the sake of argument, the LSB became less of a trailing standard and more of a proactive, real time standard? What if the LSB solved, say, 97 or 98 percent of the support issues for a given application running on top of it, meaning that a vast majority of the support effort would be common to Red Hat, SuSE and then Debian? That might change the game considerably, and I’m beginning to get the sense that many different parties within the Linux distribution and application businesses are perceiving both the long term ramifications of the problem, and the potential opportunity there is if it can be solved.”

The shot heard ’round the (Linux) world

David Berlind: “In a way that seemingly minor conflicts around the world can erupt into flash points between superpowers, the bottom line is that if a consolidation wave sweeps through the industry in 2006, it’s this acquisition of JBOSS that will have sparked it.”

Open source intelligence

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.”

Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

Yet another namespace

I’m taking Rojo for a spin, mostly because of recent upgrades that add some interesting features, including a “sort by relevance” function that lives alongside the usual “sort by date”—a “personalized digg”, as some have called it.

One thing I like about Rojo is that it’s a River of News style aggregator, which means all feeds get combined into a single stream that’s very easy to scan for interesting items, rather than serving as just another way of filling my inbox with stuff I won’t have time to read anyway (the “aggregator as an extention to the email client” model).

With River of News style aggregators, it’s no big deal if you miss something, kinda like it’s no big deal if you don’t read every last article in the newspaper every morning.

Trouble is, how do you make sure you read the most important stuff first, so in the event you don’t get through everything, the likelihood you miss something is small? “Sort by relevance” would appear to solve this problem nicely.

Rojo appears to calculate “relevance” by analyzing a few things: What I read (i.e., what I click on), what I tag (either by giving it “mojo” or by tagging it in the Web 2.0 sense of the word), and what my contacts read and tag.

That seems like a reasonable enough algorithm. Problem is: 1. most of the things I read Rojo doesn’t know anything about (they’re in my browser clickstream); 2. I already have about a year’s worth of tags accumulated at del.icio.us, and I have no intention of moving those tags anywhere else (ironically enough, because del.icio.us gives me the ability to do just that); and 3. I already have more social networks and contact silos than I know what to do with, and I certainly don’t want another one.

So, Rojo’s new features are less interesting than they appear at first glance. Guess I’m going to have to continue doing without, either until I decide to dump all my stuff in one place (ahem) or until small pieces loosely joined evolves a bit further.

Update: On second look, it looks like relevance is actually calculated by the total number of reads and tags rather than by the number of reads or tags by me or my contacts. Not sure how that can be called personalized, but I guess those are the words of others, not Rojo’s.

Comments Off on Yet another namespace

Inconceivable!

Dave Winer: “You can view the 60-percent-Vista-rewrite story as something of a software development IQ test. Anyone who believes that it’s conceivable is someone who hasn’t got the most basic clue about how software development works.”

Good artists copy, great artists steal

Nicholas Carr: “France gave Apple the treatment it usually reserves for Microsoft, as its National Assembly passed a measure that would require Apple to unlock its iPod/iTunes fortress. Apple, whose Macintosh design team once famously flew the pirate flag above its Silicon Valley hideout, immediately attacked France’s move as ‘state-sponsored piracy.'”

Comments Off on Good artists copy, great artists steal

He told me so

Jeff Licquia: “I was as surprised as Ian to see Jeremy’s response. Why do I not have a Yahoo account? Because I don’t trust Yahoo to be as careful with my data as I am. You’d think Yahoo would want to convince me otherwise; after all, I frequently dole out advice on things like this to hundreds of potential Yahoo customers. Apparently, there’s some advantage to confirming my paranoia, however many people I scare off software-as-a-service using that confirmation as ammunition.”

Technorati Tags: , ,

Comments Off on He told me so

Mixed messages

Google: “[T]he online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.”

Yes, I understand those are thoughts on a future strategy and not something that describes the state of affairs today. But if that is indeed the strategic direction, don’t you think Google (and Yahoo and the others) would be going out of their way to make people feel comfortable with data on their services being the Golden Copy?

Technorati Tags: , ,

Dipshits like me

Jeremy Zawodny: “In related news, some guy had 300MB of ‘CRUCIAL data’ stored in Gmail and found his account deleted. He had no backups and claims that he ‘fell victim to Google.’ He ends by asking for advice because ‘this is an emergency for me.’ How about getting a clue? All I can think is ‘what kind of dipshit doesn’t backup his CRUCIAL data?!’ Seriously. Gmail is a free beta service.”

Interesting. Is my friend a dipshit too? Am I? Isn’t the whole point of software-of-a-service that you can just put your stuff “in the cloud” and let someone else (you know, someone with hundreds of millions of dollars of computing infrastructure and thousands of employees and—presumably anyway—some sort of backup policy) take care of it for you so it “just works”? Isn’t that what Google, Yahoo, etc. have been trying to sell us? It’s certainly compelling to me, which is why I’ve been moving in that direction myself. Interesting, though, that when they screw up, they call us dipshits for following them. I guess that’s what the cop-out “beta” moniker is designed to do—put all your stuff here, but if we screw up, don’t blame us, you dipshit, it’s a free beta service!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,