Since the news about Google demanding unfiltered search came out earlier today, I’ve speculated in a number of places that Google have broader reasons for wanting out of China, and that the issue of search – and, by extension, free speech – was not exactly #1 on their list of priorities. In particular, I mentioned on LWN my thoughts on what kind of an effect Chinese infiltration of Google Apps would have on the customer base they’re trying to build.
Category: Misc (Page 2 of 3)
That’s apparently what a group of UK inventors are asking for. On the face of it, their arguments are pretty hard to dismiss: if you have a patent, it is extremely costly to “enforce” it and essentially means it’s only open to the big boys.
Sadly, the article doesn’t really talk much about patent quality or the goals of the patent system, and although it brings up the problem of accidental infringement / independent invention, it doesn’t really explore any possible solutions. Certainly, we do seem to have a system which requires a severe overhaul at the moment, though.
Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing.
Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important. A number of people on Facebook started a group to protest this, and took to the streets of Wallington last night.
It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters. I don’t know if speeches like Stallman’s were co-ordinated – I suspect more likely happenstance – but it all seemed very well timed.
I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.
Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else – it’s like other websites just time out.
apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality. I would link to something useful if I could, but surprisingly(?) their website is well out of date. Paraphrasing the specific questions they’re asking, though:
- When should ISPs be filtering/blocking traffic?
- Should Govt. intervene over Phorm-like services?
- Do we need new initiatives to protect privacy online?
- Is the global approach to kiddie porn working?
- Who should pay for traffic, and should Net Neutrality be enshrined in law?
If you want to respond, you need to write not more than four pages and submit it via email to the admin user at the domain apcomms.org.uk – you have until the 22nd May 2009. I’d be interested in people blogging on this topic, particularly their responses.
So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.
Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.6 billions. Such a rich deal that even Microsoft would have been forced into debt (though doubtless they’re thanking themselves for walking away now – the timing would have been awful). When we look today, it’s around $13 and has been as low as $9. Shareholders were rightly steaming.
If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.
The news of the world “newspaper” did a “reveal” of Top Gear’s “The Stig” character – so many quotes, but Stig is just a name, they didn’t actually reveal who it was, and I’m not sure they’re really a newspaper 😉
At least. They say that they didn’t reveal who it was, but if you go to the story you’ll see they have a picture of “the Stig” showing just his eyes – apparently giving a clue to the readers. If you don’t want to know who they think the Stig is, don’t click “More”.
You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on my blog over the past couple of months. This has been for a couple of reasons: primarily, I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been sort-of locked out of it while my laptop was out of commission. I was a Blosxom user, which is a lovely piece of software and very simple, and I chose it because it’s very easy to integrate into another site – however, that has now bitten the dust.
