Category: Technology

Dries takes on the old guard

Dries, on meeting with the Flemish Radio- and Television Network (VRT), who will be using Drupal:

I’m going to tell them that traditional media has no choice but to move forward. I spent the last 5 years of my life developing software that enables individuals to publish and share content on the internet. Soon, amateur content providers will have very powerful tools to compete with traditional media. I’m going to tell them that we are reshaping the future of news, information and journalism, and that, if they want to avoid getting left behind, they have to position themselves at the forefront of citizen journalism, take part in it, and embrace new internet technologies.

Untitled #2, Incomplete

Someone was telling me how, two years ago, they commented that Google is basically Microsoft 2.0.

Big companies follow a pattern. Evil ensues. Rinse, wash, repeat.

WiFi is a municipal matter. Connectivity should be considered a public good.

For obvious reasons. Look, I mean, I decided that privacy is bunk a long time ago so it’s not even that that I’m terribly worried about (your privacy is little more than sand between your fingers).

While quality of service is certainly important — and someone like Google, with its oodles of dollars — can probably ensure adequare coverage and uptime, that’s still not the issue. Communities are resilient when left up to their own devices.

I mean, look at Indian traffic (something I experienced firsthand in Bangalore). You wouldn’t think that it’d work — there’s practically no rules — but y’know what? Almost because the drivers are the ones responsible alone for their fate, they pay better attention, drive more cautiously and use their horns for communication instead of anger. It works — and it’s not just because of some kind of pacifist disposition inherit in Indians.

Point is, okay, that Google is interested in behavior. They’ve shown that they’re interested in 1) selling advertisements 2) pleasing their investors. Innovation is a means to an end. None of these things are intrinsically bad. Guns don’t kill people, robots do. Capitalism didn’t ask to become the scourge of our age, but dammit, someone severed the hand of Adam Smith a long time ago.

Anyway, here’re my two beefs du jour with the GoogleNet plan. Equal distribution. I simply don’t believe that privatized systems give a shit about under performing, under represented or unprofitable ventures. Oh yeah, that’s why they have philanthropic arms (yeah, ok, tell me if this makes sense: poison the environment while contributing to the Sierra Club?).

Second issue? Competition. State-sponsored monopolies suck.

Oh, and hell, toss in one point five more: Network Neutrality and the fact that it’s unnecessary. Here’s an alternative plan — just like you can buy your electricity and cable from multiple vendors, I’d like to be able to get my WiFi from the vendor of my choice. With prices falling all the time for the tech, that’s not the problem. Google wants to lock down the market. With technologies like WiMax available and being deployed elsewhere, seriously, we don’t need the Google Machine monopolizing this space.

You remember there was this company that embedded its browser in its OS and was forced to offer alternatives after an extremely costly (to taxpayers) legal battle? Give it 5-10 years and you’ll see a similar battle over embedding one company’s ads and search services in the state-sponored privately-run WiFi network.

But I’m jess sayin.

Brad Neuberg tackles offline access and permanent, client-side storage for AJAX apps

The man‘s a madman. I can’t even keep up with him. Oh, a snippet from his thorough explanation:

I’ve finally finished; dojo.storage is now done, in beta, and fully open source under a business-friendly BSD license.

…

The offline and dojo.storage work together, because whether you are offline or online you can access the same persistent storage, saving data while offline then syncing when online. Expect a dojo.offline and dojo.sync in the future that will provide abstractions for common operations like this. I’m looking for financial sponsors on this if you are interested.

(Emphasis mine).

Boxely will probably be one of the coolest UI things evar

If this and this don’t get you to cream your UI shorts, you need to put down that jar of AJAX and step away from the screen. Joe Hewitt blogged about Boxely nearly a year ago and its finally looking like it might be nearing some kind of release (if only in AIM Triton).

As for what you can expect in the design of Boxely? Corey Lucier says this:

Style rules, and the triggers that dictate what visual styles are applied when – is 100% based on the state of an element. Specifically the style rules are fully attribute and property driven (e.g when hovered == true for this element apply a procedural color transform). The current complexity of cascading style engines is all due to the need for resolving ambiguity and precedence given the layering of selectors.

With Mac hardware able to boot Windows, it’s only a matter of time before we UI people assimilate the Windows desktop with stuff that actually looks, feel and behaves like the richness we’ve come to take for granted on the Mac.

…Hmm, Boxely would actually make for a pretty good topic at DCamp. Along the lines of Justin Clift’s Flame Project…