On the Winamp 2.77 changelog: AVS includes experimental fullscreen overlay mode. I tried it, it rocks. Just the thing when you need a little distraction :-).

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John Robb: Behold the terrible power of the modern state. Behold the terrible power of the world united.

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The last two issues of The Onion — on the Sep 11 bombings — rock.

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AOL Mobile Communicator: This sort of device could really catch on, especially if they price it a bit lower (current prices: $100 for the device, and $30 per month for the service, not including the cost of the AOL subscription itself). As of now, they have major metropolitan areas covered. Considering that many cellphone users, especially in Asia, use their cellphones purely for SMS, this might be a great alternative.

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W3C Patent Policy Framework, Section 2.2: it is especially important that the Recommendations covering lower-layer infrastructure be implementable on [a royalty free] basis.

Jeffrey Zeldman points out

There’s no way of knowing … is HTTP part of the lower-layer infrastucture? Is HTML? What about XML and CSS? For the community to buy into RAND, W3C needs to spell out exactly which technologies are and will remain Royalty-free. Otherwise, it’s open season for corporate lawyers to exploit W3C’s vagueness to their companies’ financial advantage.

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Disturbing thought: Is it a coincidence that, now that the web is perceived by beancounters and PHBs to be ‘not as hot as it used to be’, we have the ideas like the RAND floating about? It’s almost like a trial balloon floated by beancounters at BigCo: hey, we can’t make money off the Web any other way, why not see if we can squeeze something out of our patent portfolio which we have been giving away to freeloaders at the W3C all these years?

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Backup Brain:

[Imagine] The W3C says that all patents by members relating to the web must be royalty free. The next day, Microsoft resigns its membership. The day after that, it announces that it’s no longer going to allow free access to its patent on CSS, and announces that Netscape and Opera need to either remove CSS support from their browsers or pay an exorbitant price per downloaded copy. What happens to the web then?

Balkanization, I guess. But — counterpoint: What happens when (say) Unisys pushes a cool new standard called XYZ as a W3C spec, under RAND, for the small sum of $1 per installation for each implementor, or for a sum of $100,000 for an unlimited number of installs? (sounds Reasonable And Non Discriminatory, right?) Problem: there is no way the Konquerer and Mozilla developers are can keep track of the use of their software, and anyway it is unreasonable to expect volunteer developers to pay to implement a standard. MSFT, Opera, et al, on the other hand, could probably work out a deal with Unisys wherein they pay per CD shipped or per download from their site. The end-result is large groups of content-creators and a smaller group of browser developers disenfranchised from the W3C system, which ’til today was accessible to Joe Developer and Big Megacorp alike. Now Joe Developer will not sit idle, he will fork the web to keep it free. So the end result is Balkanization again.

But between the two Balkans, I know which one I would rather have, and it is not the first. And — IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Philips and all the rest of ‘em so lovingly pushing RAND need a reality check here — the web is more valuable to you unbalkanized. Wake up and smell the coffee.

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The Register on IBM and the RAND. Quotable Quote: "IBM’s a great supporter of Linux if it can avoid pissing on its feet." I’ve always felt it odd anyway that a company that talks about peace, love and Linux can also talk about Electronic Rights Management Systems with a straight face. (Note: Electronic Rights Management Systems are IMHO not bad per se. Their implementation, however, which till today chiefly relies on closed-source OSes and — unforgivably — security through obscurity, is.) IBM is too big to behave as a monolithic entity, some will say. Nevertheless, I think IBM should do some thinking about where it wants to be in the future — eating one’s cake and having it too is not always possible.

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The Death of a W3C Standard. Oh, maybe I’m being overdramatic, but I think if this keeps up we’ll be seeing a lot of “W3C non-compliant” graphics sprouting up on web pages. What’s scarier is that the most popular web browser on the planet — IE — will automatically follow the official web standards (no surprise here, MS is a big cheese in the W3C), leaving the ‘unofficial’ web inaccessible to the vast majority of users. Can you say ‘corporatisation of the web’? Anyway, this is probably a good time to start checking out Mozilla and Konquerer — they are not upto IE’s standard yet, but somehow in a (putative for now, thank goodness) patented web, I trust them a lot more than I would IE.
Note to TBL: We still trust you. End this RAND madness now.

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Clay Shirky on Web Services:

Take the inches-to-millimeters example; who would willingly incur the overhead and latency of a remote HTTP call when they could simply multiply inches by 25.4 to get millimeters? These sample services illustrate that it’s difficult to create a web service that doesn’t rely on both the client and the server understanding the terms of the transaction in advance.

Both the client and the server understanding the terms of the transaction in advance. Which is why Microsoft, IBM and Sun can drum the increased ‘interop’ webservices give developers. They know, in the larger scheme of things, XML based interop is useless without standard vocabularies emerging. Microsoft’s .NET MyServices and especially BizTalk, and the Sun-supported ebXML effort are portents of the battles to come.

On another note, it is commonly noted that there is nothing that can be done through web services and SOAP/XML-RPC that can’t be done through a plain old CGI/POST combo. But that is beside the point — comparing properly implemented webservices — not stock quotes — to CGI/POSTs is like comparing a CGI app written app written in C with a servlet in Java. Sure, both do the same thing (and CGI/C is still in use), but if I have to develop a web-based transactional system, I know which one I would prefer, thank you. The key points are ease of use and maintainability — and all the other benefits that published interfaces give you.

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