Between Malygos & The Nexus, Obsidian Sanctum, and the fact that Ulduar is , er, quite huge, I think there's some sour grapes there.

The new Colesium 10/25 raid has some quite fun encounters; Faction Champions in 25 is a fun grawl, and Twin Val'kyrs has a unique twist. Of course, this is all to get people to gear up for Icecrown, so there's not another Sunwell debacle where most people don't get to see that content.

I don't get the bitterness about grinding, it's inevitable that something new will always be added - you never will "win" the game. The only reason there is to go hardcore or to grind it out is to be "first". And with the achievements / title system, you get to brag about it afterwards, if that's your thing.

While in principle, I agree, it's unclear what level of "free" involvement one expects from a standards organization.

"Pay to play" standards organizations have for long been the norm - including the W3C. The IETF, while not pay-to-play, is certainly funded by large organizations.

So, in their cases, while you don't need to pay to implement the standard, you do need to contribute to the standards organization costs (not trivial) to participate in forming the standard.

In short, organizing teams of people costs money, and someone has to foot the bill. That's either a background benefactor, or its a published process for participants.

Back in those days, "open systems" was coined by UNIX vendors for the same reason - you didn't need to buy IBM hardware to run software, you could run software, and it was arguably portable. BillG took the same term and applied it to Windows in a different sort of way - if you ran Windows, you could still fire your hardware vendor and swap in a new one.

It was a bigger deal than one might imagine in today's world of virtual machines. People couldn't switch off of IBM despite tens of millions of $$ going to them for mainframes. The same argument applied to "software platform" was why Java took off in the 90's - that way you could use Linux, Windows, or UNIX and it wouldn't matter (for server software, anyway, for the most part - GUI was more of a failure).

So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.

That's completely, utterly false. 'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's. The OMG had open standards in the early 90's for distributed objects. The ANSI, ISO, and IEEE go much further back (POSIX dates back to 1988).

Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things, with two different outcomes. Open source without an open (potentially standard) interoperability architecture is unlikely to generate interoperable & competing implementations. Sure, you can always fork, but that leads to a cacaphony of slightly differing and incompatible options that geeks might love but most customers despise.

On the other hand, open standards without an open source reference implementation may cause problems with the standard's proper adoption, as there's no example for implementors to use. But going too far on the open source side is also a risk to standards adoption -- if an open source RI is copylefted, that dissuades adoption in its own way. Whereas a more permissive license, say MIT, Apache, CC-Attribution, etc. would better incentivize adoption.

Trash SQL in favour of coding all your data access needs. Welcome back to 1973, guys.

It's not like we could do parallel SQL in the 1980's. Or that you can't do parallel SQL in a compute cloud today.

No, It basically seems like they don't want to pay software vendors any money for database technology. That's mostly what the arguments boil down to. Oracle RAC is very scalable, arguably easier to do at massive scale than MySQL - but you have to pay Oracle money. For an Internet startup, I can understand why you'd take your chances with "roll your own". For an enterprise... I think not.

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

SAN FRANCISCO--Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. ... (click link to read the rest)

A lot of people disagree with your view. This isn't a cut & dry case like OJ. The man had a serious Peter Pan complex, yes. Was a he a pedophile? I don't think so, and apparently neither did a jury.

As for his career decisions, etc., I think you are extremely wrong on this. Even a cursory look into the making of his records, videos, etc., shows the man had brains. There are numerous artists that have worked with him that will attest to this, unless you're going to write all of them off too.

Don't forget Skinny Puppy. There wouldn't have been a Pretty Hate Machine without them, and I'm pretty sure "Down In It" was Trent's Ode to "Dig It" ;-)

Also, for metal fans, there were..
Faith No More
Metallica
Slayer
Iron Maiden (w/ Dickinson)
Celtic Frost
Bathory
Voivod

All hugely influential...

It uses the Phone's SN#, I believe.

How do I know this? Well, I don't, but I've verified that Find my iPhone "works" with just WiFi if your phone is otherwise SIMless.

Unfortunately, "Works" is a relative term -- it will guess the location of the IP address based on the WHOIS information, which won't help much other than identify the ISP's location.

On the other hand, it will still display remote messages. And will do a remote wipe.

Twitter is not a trivial application to scale, considering the wide disparity in listeners to follower ratios, that views are dynamically generated by interpolating many-to-many message streams, and that each message is persistent forever.

As an analogy, It's like managing an IRC server, with persistent messages that are full-text indexed, with one channel per user, and unlimited number of users can join each other's channels. When you join a new user's channel, your chat log is automatically (and quickly) re-woven with messages from that channel according to relative time series of these messages. And, there's a global channel that everyone can watch to see what any user in any channel is saying at any time.

Now do this, all the while avoiding netsplits (i.e. missing messages), allowing retracts of almost message, recent or historical, and ensuring the channel history (eventually) reflects that change. And handle sudden bursts of activity among unpredictable sets of channels because they're all attending the same conference, or a burst of network-wide high activity because people are watching the World Cup or Obama's inauguration.

The point is that, while the idea is simple, the variability of use and disparity of activity is what makes life interesting; the messaging & DB architecture that works well for recent activity, for example, doesn't help for having reasonable persistent random-access to historical messages.

In all, Twitter has gotten a *lot* more reliable the past several months than it was a year ago.

The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.

Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons:
- Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't.
- What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML, ... ?
- How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?

But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?

So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards ... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....

My honest read of the article is:
- cloud interoperability is important (as you say -- XML, BLOB, plaintext, whatever interface is agreed on, though there's a longer discussion about the implications of what you choose on adoption)
- yet there's a "race to the bottom" of creating a lowest common denominator, looking at very complex things like networking equipment, firewalls and load balancers as mere commodities, when in fact they're pretty complicated.
- most of the cloud interoperability discussion is driving for a "high level interface" for developers to access, when what you need is a much more detailed set of metadata to be able to capture the rather more complicated tweaks & configurations.

Interestingly enough, there's already some standards for granular metadata in data centres, like the DMTF's CIM. The problem is that this was more designed to "set state" on storage arrays, switches, and servers, not to be used as "metadata" that is stored and traded around, maybe modified and collaborated on, etc.

It's not about Flash vs. Silverlight so much as this particular streaming technology. They sold the Obama-folks on it early on, and it *happened* to built on Silverlight (MS was an investor in the startup). This technology in my experience has better adaptive compression than the typical Flash streaming (even HD), though I'm not about to claim it will be the only technology that can do this.

In any case, the point is somewhat moot in that a Moonlight-based streaming version seems to be available for LInux and MacPPC users.

SImply put, the FOSS technology sucks. If it was better (video quality / usability, for starters), then people would be inclined to use it.

Issues of accessibility aside, there is a clear technical reason for this choice: the video quality is astounding for a streaming medium.

The DNC website streamed the 2008 convention with Sliverlight technology from Move Networks in high definition, and, from what I can tell, that's the same technology they will be using for the Inauguration.

This is near-HD quality streaming, with adaptive correction (i.e. no pauses to "buffer"). Startup is nearly instantaneous.

Given that 99% of users are using Windows or Intel Macs, and that they need to stream *live*, I'm not sure what open technology you would have them use that has been proven in practice and has comparable quality. You would be basically insisting that the government fall back to the technological equivalent of AM Radio because they haven't published the specifications of how to build your own FM Radio, even though they're giving out new radios at no charge....

So, I don't view this as a mistake, or a screw-up. I view it as a challenge to FLOSS supporters to build a better (or at least, *competitive*) video streaming solution. The freedom to use crap is not freedom.