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Adobe Flash Is Bad - Finally Some Sanity - Steve Jobs Thoughts On Flash

Jobs IpadFor many years, Adobe Flash has annoyed me to no end. Yes, I know it's the defacto standard for rich media and casual games, but it runs badly on mobile devices and is a pain in the @ss to get up on some educational Linux distros. It's proprietary... with all the problems inherent trying to mix it with Open Source.

Steve Jobs lays it out clearly as an artifact of the past. With HTML5's Javascript and native h.264 video support, who needs Flash anymore?

Embrace the change, developers, your life will be much nicer without Adobe's agenda to work around. - Kelley Graham April 2010 :)

Read the full article here- http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

49 Joomla Sites -> 1 Drupal Site - Archdiocese of Saint Louis Migrates to Drupal

A great case study as to why Joomla is limited to simple brochure sites and Drupal is for modern powerhouse sites.

http://drupal.org/node/720832

Apple iPad - Uber Slick + Affordable - The Real Costs

WiFi = $499
WiFi + 3G = $629

32GB Upgrade to enough disc space for a weekend full of movies = $729
3G Unlimited Plan, No Contract

Your're going to love it!, but you're addicted now and in 2 years you'll need version 2, which will be way better. Since you have no wireless contract and iPad v2 will cost the same as v1, why not upgrade?

3G 2 yrs @ $29 month = $696
TOTAL REAL COST NOW = $1429
TOTAL REAL COST IN 2 YEARS = $1429
TOTAL 4 YEAR COSTS = $2850

More good stuff at: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/ipad-will-hurt-your-...

iPad - Addictive

The Microsoft-Linux Story As Told in the Comes Exhibits

Why Monopolies are bad... from Groklaw.

The Microsoft-Linux Story As Told in the Comes Exhibits - As we are working on the data in the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits, describing the contents or transcribing each so as to make them keyword searchable, we are coming across some interesting materials regarding Microsoft's view of Linux. As far back as 1999, Bill Gates was asking his executives if there was a way to make things harder for Linux. For example, here's Comes Exhibit 3020:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Westorinon; Ben Fathi
Cc: Carl Stork; Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

1999. He wanted to patent something so as to hobble Linux and keep it from "working great".

Wait until you read about the EDGI program to keep folks in governments and educational institutions from switching to Linux, and then there is another exhibit that shows exactly how Microsoft tried to worm its way into OLPC and who helped it. [Groklaw]

Google Android Nexus One - Disappoints

Here's what you need to know - $530 Unlocked, $180 With T-Mobile.

Only one plan available at signup.

Google didn't learn with their underwhelming G1 launch... business as usual. It was rumored that Google would sell the phone at something close to cost... when will the open source (fairness?) model be fully adopted by a large company.

I'm sick of the mantra of the shamelessly greedy: 'The price is whatever the market will bear'.

Question for Google: Why don't you lead in business practice like you lead in engineering?

See the recommended links below for more.

Google Wave - Not For The Enterprise... And That's Great!

If you're in mainstream business, Google Wave is probably not for you. Not now at least, but it is for our kids.

I've already laid out my thoughts on new media and The Destruction of the English Language and the Wave is just another logical step... Another application of collaborative tech to the complex issue of 'Dialog'.

Let it go... Shakespeare is long dead. Long live Shakespeare.

The creative evolution of Language is natural. I'm looking forward to whatever comes.

Controlling Your Public Appearance

danah boyd

I like this blogger. Her thoughts on public identity and social media are spot on. Too bad she's involved with Microcoft. Oh well, nobody's perfect. :)

Note the Recommended links on the left for several of her blogs.

 

Blogging Is Not Writing - And That's Great!

The brouhaha between 'good' writing and blogging is really an inability to recognize that blogging is to writing as small talk is to discourse. Without chit chat, important contextual info is missing from a 'real' conversation. Blogs and tweets fill this contextual gap. It's 'natural' from a linguistic point of view. Blogs & tweets (bleats?) help inform and cultivate a richer relationship between speaker & listener.

The following is from wikipedia on an emerging 'discourse community', developed by linguist Johnathan Swales:

"A discourse community:
  1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
  2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
  3. uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
  4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
  5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.
  6. has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

James Porter defined the discourse community as: “a local and temporary constraining system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on.” [1]

Communicating With Congress - 10 Year Tech Study

The following materials are from CMF.

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Congressional Management Foundation - CMF has been researching the use of technology in congressional offices for over a decade which has produced a series of reports.

Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue
by Tim Hysom
December 15, 2008

After nearly 10 years of research, outreach, and study of the communications between citizens and Congress, CMF released recommendations for all stakeholders and suggested improvements to the structure and processes for managing congressional communications.

Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement
by Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter
June 10, 2008

To understand how citizens are communicating with their Members of Congress and what motivates them to do so, CMF partnered with Zogby International to conduct a nationwide survey of citizens to address their methods, reasons, and expectations with regard to their communications with Capitol Hill. The resulting report discusses the results of this research with over 10,000 citizens.

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More at the link at left.

Bruce Perens: Combining GPL and Proprietary Software

Excerpt from Internet.com. Please see the Recommended Links on the left for the whole article.

About the Author: Bruce Perens is the creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of Open Source and the criterion for Open Source software licensing. Perens represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the request of the United Nations Development Program.

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