mad_ddog
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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MacBook Anorexic (Air) |
| Reviews seem to harp more on what got left out. Executives who watch DVDs on long plane trips are not the primary customer. |
Monday, January 07, 2008
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ArsTechnica: Open source: mob mentality or innovation engine? |
I was also somewhat puzzled by the specific examples of closed-source innovation that Lanier chose to defend his argument. He considers products like Adobe Flash and the Apple iPhone to be paragons of proprietary innovation. Lanier fails to note that many important components in both of those products are built with open-source software. Adobe opened the source code of its Flash ECMAScript implementation and at the heart of the iPhone is Apple's Mac OS X operating system which leverages BSD and a kernel derived from the open source Mach kernel. This guy's refutations to Lanier's examples are hit-and-miss. Adobe didn't open-source the Flash ECMAScript engine until Flash was already a widespread success. Yes, iPhone uses BSD, but I don't think that's what enabled the iPhone's more interesting features - any closed-source OS would've done the job adequately. Where open source seems to shine is in providing technologies, not finished products. How many of the OSS projects are innovative? Probably close to the Pareto principle ratio, about 20%. |
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
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Ars Technica: Adobe, Omniture in hot water for snooping on CS3 users |
| I keep on reading articles about the problem and I keep on thinking "Do people know how to read URLs???" It all began with a post at UNEASYsilence titled "Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies" which caught on to the fact that Adobe CS3 apps were calling out to a suspiciously-crafted IP address. As it turns out, the IP in question—But the "IP" address ends in '.net', how can it be an IP address then??? Very social-engineering of the folks at Omniture. |
