Adobe announcement Adobe Accelerates Shift to the Cloud includes a death sentence on standalone channel applications of Creative Suite. CS 6 is the end of the line. This strategy is good for Adobe but it is not good for users. Continue reading
Adobe announcement Adobe Accelerates Shift to the Cloud includes a death sentence on standalone channel applications of Creative Suite. CS 6 is the end of the line. This strategy is good for Adobe but it is not good for users. Continue reading
Ars Technica report on West Virginia overspending on Cisco routers while fascinating misplaces much of its blame on Cisco for selling unnecessary equipment to the state. It is misplaced because the state government of West Virginia failed to properly assess its needs for the technology.
While the state auditor states “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers,” where is the statement that the employees of the State of West Virginia showed both incompetence and negligence in its governance of the project and accountability in spending? Continue reading
Ever since the introduction of the Office ribbon in Office 2007, I have begun to think Microsoft has a secret soft spot for open source software. No action prior to this had motivated me more to look at open source offerings. With Office 365, the version associated with Windows 8, Microsoft again provides sufficient motivation to look at alternatives*. Continue reading
Because it needs to be reposted, here is a list of the Seven Deadly Sins of Software Executives. This orginated from a 2005 Edge Forum – Deadly Sins that Can Kill Your Software Company, but polished and modified by me:
Runtime Revolution announced their Kickstarter to create a dual licensed open source version of Livecode. This is a major next step for the platform – you can continue to ship commercial, closed source applications under the original plan, plus there will be a way to create your own open source apps free.
LiveCode is the true descendant of HyperCard, the one-time Apple product that made it possible to program visual objects in an English like language. Runtime did though what Apple didn’t do – instead of killing a wonderful product, they made sure you can build your apps on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and also deploy to Windows, Linux, MacOS X, iOS (yes, iPad and iPhone apps!) and Android. There is even a server-side solution.
Why use LiveCode? For one, its an extremely productive environment. The language is easy to learn – especially if you have no background in programming and do not want to become a hard core programmer. This allows specialists of all kinds – doctors, artists, chefs, etc – anyone with a specialized set of knowledge, to build applications around their specialized knowledge sets. The first company I owned, which was a translation/localization/testing company in Japan, had a set of localization tools built with the predecessor to LiveCode – which I learned to use with just the product itself and a stack of manuals…in Japanese.
Now even if you are already a programmer, or you want to pursue a career as a programmer, LiveCode is still an excellent product. You can get started sooner rather than later on building useful applications and, you learn in the process most of what you need to know conceptually that will carry you over to any other languages you might pick up later (and LiveCode is fully extensible with extensions you can write in other languages like C++).
I recently visited an AT&T store to upgrade a phone. All the AT&T employees on the floor were using iPads to manage orders and service agreements with customers. This didn’t seem so strange to me. Using portable POS devices is nothing new after all. But what struck me is how awkward and slow the experience was. Continue reading
To quote Charles M Schultz “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people… Religion, Politics, and The Great Pumpkin. ” Since this Halloween and the Great Pumpkin is almost here, Ill take a momentary break and talk meta-politics. I will be as unpolitical about my politics as possible without actually talking politics. Continue reading
We license a lot of content through the Meshbox Design division of Proactive International. Meshbox primarily focuses on original 3D content that is licensed to digital production houses, film studios and individual artists. Meshbox also makes the original Santa that is the mascot Santa for NORAD’s annual NORAD Tracks Santa site.
There are evil scum who repost our 3D content as well as are market images. Sending out DMCA takedown notices is a very tiresome task. Usually it doesn’t do much good to contact the warez site where its being given away, but more effective to send DMCA takedown notices to the sites that actually host the files.
One problem with this is that Google indexes just about everything it finds, and sometimes the warez results end up being higher in Google’s search than the original creator. Ive decided to see what I can do about that.
I found some of our models on a warez site, and already got the 3D models themselves removed from the file sharing sites that host them. However, this same warez site took our original marketing renders and reused them. These images have been indexed by Google. We are trying to get Google to remove those links to those images.
After following the reporting methods provided by Google, we’ve gotten our first feedback from Google – stating that they got our DMCA takedown notice, but do not understand it. They also replied asking for links – which were already included in our original post. Now, Ive followed this up with a more detailed explanation. It seems clear to me: you are linking to our images, and caching those images in the Google web search. The original images they are indexing are illegal, therefore they are copying illegally posted images into their search engine – pretty clear to me – remove the links and the associated images.
Ill follow up with updates on how this goes.
By way of reporting by Electronista, Judge Richard Posner writes in his blog entry Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? Posner about how the software industry has completely overreached itself in software patents. I cannot agree more. As we’ve seen in the Apple vs Samsung trial, patents are granted for non-innovations, such as a bouncing effect when one reaches the bottom of a list on a smart phone.
Apple makes for a convenient poster child for this, but they are not alone. Most of these “innovations” are modest tweaks of the work done by others, and the only thing they do is buy time for the company that patents them first, until the time comes that those patents will get tossed. But time is all they need – time to keep other companies from implementing them. This doesn’t even equate to standing on the shoulders of giants.
I don’t have Netflix, but I have been enjoying the Prime video service of Amazon Prime perhaps just a little too much. Every time I get close to finishing some obscure series on Prime, Amazon restocks with something I really want to see – especially intelligently written British television shows like Touching Evil and Trial & Retribution. But Netflix is feeling the pangs of a changing market. Continue reading