Planet 無 Matt

In the modern day, writing computer code--specifically a human-readable ASCII text form referred to as source code--is the de facto way of programming computers.

Kernel hacking is the term in computer jargon for developing, modifying, or writing computer code at the kernel, or system level.

Research in Motion's Blackberry Phone is often configured by default to have a default e-mail signature akin to Sent using Blackberry. This signature is highly annoying and inconsiderate, and violates netiquette e-mail standards.

Unfortunately, RIM doesn't make it non-trivial to change this. Users should be able to log into their provider's configuration utility to modify (or remove) the signature. Really, this should be configurable from the device itself.

WaterFire is a festival which takes place in downtown Providence during the summer. People light things on fire, Dunkin' Donuts gives out free samples, and people come to the city to spend money.

The Apple iPhone--not to be confused with the Linksys iPhone or the much earlier Infogear iPhone--is a GSM mobile phone. It's biggest drawing points are that it has the Apple name, it is shiny, and is expensive. Much like the Motorola RAZR, it inspired a number of other vendors to copy it in form and interface, such as the move away from mechanical keys to smudged touch screens.

The Linksys iPhone, a rebranding of the Infogear iPhone which Cisco had acquired prior to the Cisco acquisition of Linksys, is a WiFi phone that operates--depending on the model--over either the Skype network or over a standard SIP (VoIP) connection.

The Linksys SIP iPhone is actually a pretty neat little thing, although a little rough around the edges.

Routing is handled by servers at Opera, and the computer on your desk is addressed as "unite://computername.username.operaunite.com". Where possible connections are peer-to-peer, in just the way that the internet was originally envisioned, but much routing will be through the Unite proxy. Conspiracy fans have long posited that the proliferation of NATs and Firewalls is part of a process to divide the internet into "publishers" and "consumers", and Opera is happy to play up their part in reversing this process…

I remember when the Mozilla browsers first added in-browser FTP and HTTP engines, which seemed like a neat idea, but as these were add-ons or extensions, their reach was even less than that of the Opera web browser.

This is a neat idea, which I would hope would be picked-up by other entities. The return to a universal publisher model of the web would be a good thing for everyone as it not only provides the masses with greater power, but it would liberate the minds of the non-technically gifted.

In an odd trend, when the web was younger, it seemed more common for most users to have a web page of some level, just to have their say--even among the non techies. Grandma would have a cookie recipe posted, while mom and dad would highlight what's going on with their kids. These days, doing this is considered a cyber-space oddity; the exception rather than the norm. People have moved from a democratic model to the walled garden social networks which has limited their expressive power, but provided a comfortable cookie-cutter communication experience. The current mentality has shifted to the believe that the common people need an environment managed by a large corporation to tell them how to express themselves.

If the idea behind Opera Unite catches on, the victory will not be that users have yet another way of making data available, but that it will cause a mental shift back towards what Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned, a web where users had control of their own information and the masses were the soul of the web.

There has been discussion of including a ballot screen for choosing alternative software packages in the upcoming version of MicroSoft's Windows Operating System version 7. While this has been discussed in the past, most recently this is related to the ongoing European antitrust investigations of Microsoft, and center on the exclusive nature of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

The proposal would allow users to easily select their preferred software to install from the original system installation instead of making them do so afterwards. More importantly, providing the interfaces for tighter integration would let users choose from a wider selection of options, including those that are not pre-installable. This would not be much different from the distributors of most other operating systems--somebody who installs SuSE Linux chooses from several web browsers that integrate just as well into a unified desktop environment (and, admittedly, many more that don't try and integrate themselves to the same extent).

This is much different that the criticisms being put forward, such as:
"The idea of having a ballot screen as a whole is a ridiculous idea. The entire purpose of this ballot screen would be to promote competing products within Windows. Hello!!! Do I really need to explain to you how ridiculous that is? You can't honestly look me in the eyes monitor and not laugh a little inside at the thought of this. To use some of my wacky (and somewhat amusing!) analogies again, that's like Pepsi putting a label on their drinks saying "Have you tried Coke lately?" or General Motors hanging a little air freshener in all of their cars with the message "Perhaps you would prefer a Toyota?" Come on, it's crazy!"

This is instead much closer to the situation of choosing between the Toyota ZZ engine that comes stock, or a Chrystler Hemi if the user wants to feel more power, or a Honda L engine if the user would rather bias the design towards efficiency. Although not all car manufacturers will let you choose an arbitrary engine to fit your taste, most provide some degree of flexibility: Subaru lets me choose an Impreza from 160hp to 300hp, Volkswagen lets me choose between diesel and petro fuel in their Golf and has announced a hybrid engine option.

The problem is that MicroSoft doesn't offer any real options. While they offer several varieties of the same software distribution, this is just one software package that has been crippled in increasingly severe ways to create lower value variations. One way around this is to force MicroSoft to license their software to third-party distributors who would choose what software to build a distribution around.