Luis reminded me the other day of one of the few smart insights I’ve ever had: the notion that in the free software world, a free-for-all of self-organizing social systems, “evolution” of a sort selects for nice people. Commenters at the time (rightly, I think) complained that “nice” was a bit “self-patting.” Jeff Waugh worked …
A correspondent poses an interesting question about the usability of RSS feeds for non-geeks. I love RSS, but the way I use it is completely geeky, so I’m probably a bad test case. If you’re reading this blog via an RSS feed, how are you doing it? What sort of software interface are you using, …
My Gmail’s still inaccessible. It took Jugboy 13 days. update: It’s back up, a 24-hour outage. Looks as though nothing was lost.
I made the switch to Gmail nearly two years ago. I’d look it up and tell you the exact date, but I can’t because I can’t access my Gmail account. All day long, the same message: We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, …
Via Luis, Matt Asay discusses the King James Bible and free/open software. Until William Tyndale created his English translation, the Bible was Latin, the province of the priests (and even many of them only had access intermediated by the church): By making “public” the Bible, Tyndale enabled lay readers to discover Christianity for themselves, unmitigated …
Irony upon ironies. Ed Felten reports on the evidence that Sony’s profoundly troubling digital rights management software includes code from a number of GPL and LGPL programs. (It goes without saying that the programs do not comply with the GPL/LGPL.) In other words, the industry giant self-righteously arguing against the theft of intellectual property has …
Aaron’s delightful tale of being laid off: I don’t know where I’m headed, but it could be practically anywhere. I could visit my brother in Bolivia. I could move to my grandmother’s farm in Ivy, VA, and raise pet goats, write freelance, sell vegetables at the farmer’s market. I could get the bird flu or …
Via HP, link to a fascinating piece on Steve Jobs.: Jobs doesn’t believe that technology is going to change the world. ‘This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t … Technologies can make it easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in a …
Via Luis, a trail of bread crumbs leads to Paul Graham: Actually, the fad is the word “blog,” at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by “blogger” is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That’s going to become a problem as the …
WordPress installation went off without a scratch. Well, I’m not completely scratchless. Some tidying up to do. Like figuring out how to get my own RSS feed to work on my own Planet. But it’s a sweet piece of software.