The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
We’re gathering some of the things we’ve been working on in podcasting in one spot. Come visit and let us know what you think.
The page is sort of a short directory of the podcasts folks at O’Reilly are listening to. One would assume that original content will follow along.
Since Wex is new and didn’t show up in Google’s blog and web searches before 11/10/05, I thought this would be a neat opportunity to track the spread of a new site across the blogosphere and the web. What I’ve done is create a page at gada.be: browse on over to wex-lii.gada.be to watch it spread. Of particular interest is that within 36 hours a couple of splogs are linking through to parts of Wex, and how the major search engines at MSN, Yahoo, and Google have already crawled the site.
However, before that, we will release the aggregator under an open source license, the same one we use for the OPML Editor and for the Frontier kernel, so the community can have a go at it, and equally important, to serve as a test-bed for the implementation of OPML reading lists for RSS aggregators.
Dave is going to kick this loose as part of the development of OPML reading lists project. I just wish it would run on Linux:(
The online retailer of books and just about everything else was awarded three new patents, covering its purchase circles, search and consumer reviews. While Amazon.com’s patent police would go after Web publishers, not consumers, the review patent could put the kibosh on the social networking components of many search services.
Received an email this morning from my friend Tom Bruce announcing the immeadiate availability of Wex, a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia built on the MediaWiki platform. Here’s a bit from the Wex FAQ:
What is Wex?
WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as “law novices” — which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing objective, useful material in a range of formats.
Tom and the LII crew have seeded Wex with the lot of original content that was developed for the LII’s ‘Law About..’ legal subject area series. This looks like it will be another hit for the LII.
Dave Winer posted the text of a Bill Gates email and a Ray Ozzie memo laying out a broad strategy for changing the course of MSFT. At least we now see why MSFT bought Groove: it is what Gates wants to do with MSFT and they needed the shot in the arm of an outsider (Ozzie) to get things moving. Still there is a lot of danger in trying to stop MSFT and turn it in another direction. For example, a ‘services’ company doesn’t need buildings full of developers building complex systems in near isolation from each other, so there will be a lot of internal resistance to the this new direction.
And what does the ‘product’ look like? Will Windows become a basic OS, controling the physical computer with basic file management and a single app, somne sort of uber browser that open a window to the net and all of the glorious ‘services’ that MSFT will offer? Nice idea, but a hard sell.
Finally, Ray Ozzie’s memo is worth reading in and of itself. It offers up a blue print (or even a manifesto, depending on your POV) for moving forward as the net becomes more disruptive. We are moving toward a time when all of the technologies that have been trotted out over the past 10 years will actually work, but we need to put aside the ‘been there, done that’ attitude that tends to prevade these sorts of announcements. Yes, on a certain level, everything that is in these docs is old news, but only now are we moving to a position where all of this is actually viable.
Can mention on the net turn an ordinary citizen into a public figure with severely limited abilities to fight libel and defamation lawsuits? According to a Florida judge’s ruling — perhaps the first of its kind in the United States — the answer is yes.In an Oct. 21 ruling, Florida circuit court Judge Karen Cole threw out a defamation case against two TV stations because she deemed the plaintiff — a Jacksonville woman — to be a public figure who had been subject to “substantial” internet debate.
Wired News: Net Chat Anoints Public Figure
Well, I guess this would make me a public figure too…
But the motherboard replacement program will account for the bulk of the charge, or about $300 million, he said.The replacements are necessary as some capacitors on some motherboards shipped in its GX270 and GX280 systems failed after a period of months. The failure, which is evidenced by a PC that won’t boot, comes when the capacitors bulge and fail.
Dell Warns of Layoffs, Motherboard Replacements
There was a lengthy discussion on this very topic on teknoids back in September and folks were generally not happy with the situation.
Grokster Ltd., a leading developer of Internet file-sharing software popular for stealing songs and movies online, agreed Monday to shut down operations to settle a landmark piracy case filed by Hollywood and the music industry, The Associated Press has learned.
Three image-rendering flaws in the Windows operating system could put millions of Internet-connected users at risk of PC takeover attacks, Microsoft Corp. warned on Tuesday.The flaws could be exploited via any software that displays images, including the widely used Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer programs.