// October 19th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
Man the phones people! The customer service switchboards at web application companies across the world are lighting up!
IE7 has been unleashed, that is, released to the public!
Edited 10/19/2006 @ 3:17PM CDT to add:
Didn’t take long… First IE7 Security Hole Discovered.
// October 18th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
Edward Cone has an article at CIO Insight arguing against those who espouse that the Google’s acquisition of YouTube is one of many signs that we’re entering another bubble.
He points out that, while there will always be investors ready to waste their money on ill-conceived vaportech dot-com ideas, many of the latest cashouts have been aimed at companies with huge user bases, such as MySpace and YouTube, which demonstrate the street-value of brand loyalty and adversiting potential, especially in social networking sites.
What we haven’t seen yet is what becomes of popular social networking sites once they become “corporatized”. Creating MySpace and YouTube wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that hard either, and can be repeated over and over again. If these huge investments in well-branded social networking sites result in rampant censorship, restricting access to content, or otherwise become DRM-ified, people will quickly flock to the one-off site that isn’t “0wn3d” by “the man”. After all, I gotta have my Stewie.
Time will tell if Google loses their shorts on the YouTube deal. They’re not idiots so they probably won’t. But even if they do, who cares? They throw off a few billion a year on wild ideas anyway. They don’t need all of them to pan out to make shareholders happy. Getting YouTube gave them a monopoly on the video-sharing market, at least for now, and monopolies are usually a good thing for the monopolist.
In any case, I think we’re too early in the evolution of the next-generation of web-based companies to forsee the true value of our collective investment.
// October 12th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
I had heard of the Amazon Cloud in passing a few times so finally took the time to investigate it myself.
What it is:
“Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.”
It’s Amazon’s iteration of the virtual computing hosting model and is part of their broader Web Services offering.
What’s compelling is their pricing model:
While I haven’t comparison shopped alternative vendors in this space, my rough calculations tell me that the $180 server I’m paying for with my current ISP would cost around $86 in EC2.
The other big advantage is it allows you to scale up or down as your capacity demands, and do it in minutes rather than days or weeks in the traditional box-in-a-rack model.
The downside is: 1.) it’s in BETA, 2.) there’s a waiting list.
But I’m on the list and I can’t wait to take it for a test drive!
// October 12th, 2006 // No Comments » // Business & Politics
A premise as absurd as Vice President Dick Cheney’s approach to the Global War On Terror, characterized by author Ron Suskind as “The One Percent Doctrine” (in his book of the same name), hardly merits any worthy attempt at “debunking”.
Few besides the Veep himself would argue such a perspective. But as entertaining as penetrating the stew of U.S. foreign policy can sometimes be, pundits can hardly keep themselves from a topic so rich with opportunity.
Temple mathmetican John Allen Paulos offers a curious thought experiment in the implications of applying the “one-percent doctrine” to other aspects of human life, and it’s associated fallout.
// October 12th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
I’ve been searching for this solution for a while and just stumbled on what may do the trick…if you use IMAP.
Sync Kolab is a Thunderbird extension that reads a selected IMAP folder and synchronizes it with the local address book and calendar.
The latest version uses (requires in fact) the lightening calendar plugin.
I already use IMAP anyway, and now the 3 computers I regularly use will all have identical address books. This is especially nice since I have a white-list junk mail filter. Now I won’t have to remember to add the persons email to my home computer that I added at work earlier in the day.
The extension is still in a testing phase, and time will tell if it works as well as I hope it will.
Maybe it’s just me, but I always felt that setting up an LDAP server just for this was a bit of overkill.
