Author: elmer

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3rd Party VOIP to Get Dissed?

PBS | I, Cringely . The Best days of Voice-over-IP Telephone Service May Already Have Passed
“These are heady days for Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone services. From Vonage to Packet8 to Skype and a hundred more besides, several million people around the world are enjoying really cheap phone calls that are carried primarily over the Internet. But that fun may be diminishing soon because the big Internet service providers, which is to say the big telephone and cable TV companies, are about to start taking back that third-party VoIP traffic, leaving Vonage and the others at a distinct disadvantage.“

The argument is that cable and telco broadband providers will tag their VOIP packets to guarantee a higher level of service and leave the Vonages of the world with ‘best effort’ service resulting in things like dropped calls and bad audio quality. There is no evidence of this yet, but with Comcast just announcing the availabilty of VOIP in metro Atlanta, it will be interesting to see if soemthing like this develops.

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Firefox Up, IE Down

Internet Week > > Firefox Eats More Microsoft Market Share > March 18, 2005
“Firefox continues to steal market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications, a maker of Web-monitoring software. According to the company’s February figures, use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January.

Firefox’s gain comes at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped to 89.04% market share, from 90.31% in December. Net Applications reports that other browsers maintained their user base.“

CALI is seeing this shift. Our IE share is down to 93%, off from about 98% last fall. Of course that’s still a huge domination of the market.

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EBay Spawns Drop off Stores

Internet Week > EBay Spawns Niche Market > EBay Spawns Niche Market > March 18, 2005
“With the explosive success of EBay, it’s not surprising that several companies are jumping on the bandwagon to help people sell their unwanted items on the Internet auction giant.

In this growing niche, companies like ISold It, AuctionDrop, NuMarkets, QuikDrop, and Snappy Auctions are providing convenient locations where sellers can leave their wares and let the vendors handle the rest for a fee.“

There is money to be made here, but there are a lot of issues to deal with. A franchise is probably the way to go for an individual interested in this sort of thing. Stuff to consider: storage space for sales items; minimum value of merchandise; not becoming an unwitting fence; developing expertise in pricing and/or spotting value; dealing with customers looking to unload junk. See, lots of work.

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Programmer Alleges GPL Violations

Open-source programmer alleges Linux misuse | Tech News on ZDNet
“An open-source programmer stopped by the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, this week to tell Motorola and 12 other companies he believes they’re using Linux in violation of the license that governs the software.

Harald Welte said the companies have embedded Linux in their products but haven’t released the underlying source code, as required by the General Public License, or GPL, that governs the operating system. He tried to notify 13 companies of his complaint at the sprawling trade show, but three companies refused to accept it, he said in an e-mail interview.“

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Boston College, Calif. State University computers hacked

Boston College, Calif. State University computers hacked – Computerworld
“The break-in at BC is the second such incident to be reported this week by a university. On Monday, officials at California State University in Chico disclosed that hackers had broken into a housing and food service system containing personal information — including the names and Social Security numbers — of about 59,000 current, former and prospective students, faculty and staff.“

Colleges and universities will certainly be spending more on security going forward.

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VB6 Protests Continue

Developers Prolong Visual Basic Protest
“Microsoft may have hoped that the backers of the Visual Basic “classic” code would just roll up their petition and go home.

But it doesn’t look like that’s about to happen. In fact, the Visual Basic 6 faithful seem to be gaining momentum.“

Seems that MSFT intends to EOL VB6 on March 31, 2005. MSFT wants VB developers to switch to Visual Basic .NET.

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Answering the ODEO Question

MAKE: Blog: ODEO Podcast service
“Live from Etech: Blogger.com founder Evan Williams from ODEO gave a preview of the podcast recording, hosting and publishing service. Users will be able to play audio from any page (from the source location via Macromedia Flash) use tags, subscribe, add to queues, share queues, post comments, download for iTunes, WinMedia, etc. Keep reading for more information and photos…“

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Google Launches Developer Site

BetaNews | Google Curries Favor with Developers
"Google engineers have used their flex time to create a set of online tools for open source developers. The tools, found at the Google Code Web site, include Google APIs and libraries, a source code repository and other language-specific programming utilities.

Google has turned to third party developers to build on its own technologies including its AdSense contextual advertising program, desktop search, Gmail and Google Maps. The site is intended to build community around these different initiatives."