Since the process of blogging is still much to convoluted for quick
spontaneous posts, I’ll just keep collecting the interesting links for
the day in this Quickies format, and publish once a day. Or something
like that.
- John Levine has an interesting
analysis of the two Microsoft patents
that’s been slowing down work on Sender
ID. Of particular interest is that they try to patent spam filters
(application number 20040181585, claim 48 and 49) (Via LawMeme) - Cedric Beust solicits job
applications for Google. ”If you are reading this weblog, you are
probably the kind of developer Google would like to hire […]” - Charles Miller has high
praise for the Mac app Quicksilver. It sounds
cool, I wish I could try it out. It’s very probable that I get a
{Power,i}Book as soon as I start law school (gotta wait for that student discount). If you don’t know about
the unix tool screen, you should
check out his
praise of that too. As a bonus, suggests that at least one of the
star wars prequels should have been directed by Joss Wheadon. That
would have been real interesting. - Xeni Jardin of Wired writes
about experiencing zero gravity, thanks to newly started flight
service Zero-G. Only $2950 +
whatever it costs to get to Fort Lauderdale. I’m seriously tempted. - It looks that my favourite plucker
converter, JPluckX,
has been abandoned by it’s author, Laurens M. Fridael, in favour of Sunrise. However, this section
in the faq worries
me:Sunrise is a temporary project, made available for the
purpose of letting users test the desktop tool for my upcoming offline
web viewer, which will be a commercial product. Once my viewer reaches
public beta state, the Plucker support will be removed
entirely. - Slashdot links
to a
report from PriceWaterHouseCoopers, and says that it paints a
picture of software patents as a threat to Europe’s innovative
software industry. Now, I’m as much against software patents as the
next raving lunatic open source-zealot, but first: The report mentions
patents in like three places, and only one of them explicitly
critizises software patents. In fact, the slashdot blurb contains the
entire quote, so if you’ve read that, you don’t need to download the
90+ page report. Secondly: If you compare the US software industry
(has SW patents) with the EU software industry (does not yet have real
SW patents), which of the two is more innovative and competitive?
Honestly? I just think there’s better arguments to be made against software patents.
As an aside, the report makes extensive use of the acronym
ICT, which I’ve never heard of before. A quick googling seems to
indicate that it stands for ”Information and Communication
Technologies”, which I guess is a superset of plain ol’ IT. Has this
acronym been around for long? In what circles?