Showing headlines posted by mbaehrlxer

I have no illusions about what Facebook has figured out about me from my activity, pictures, likes, and posts. Friends have speculated about how algorithms might effectively predict hook-ups or dating patterns based on bursts of "Facebook stalking" activity (you know you are guilty of clicking through hundreds of tagged pictures of your latest crush). David Kilpatrick uncovered that Facebook "could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now." And based on extensive networks of gay friends, MIT's Gaydar claims to be able to out those who refrain from listing their sexual orientation on the network. When I first turned on Timeline, I discovered Facebook had correctly singled out that becoming friends with Nick was a significant event of 2007

So why does Facebook care to know more about the nature of my relationship to Nick?

What I am going to do is get into a lot of trouble. I know that many, many people that Ken considers his friends read his blog and it feels strange sitting here writing on this screen. He has written hundreds of thousands of words and I feel silly doing this in his place. What I am here to do is talk about what is happening to Ken and try to help him a little bit.

I'm sure I don't need to explain SOPA or ACTA to regular readers of Free Software Magazine. They're toxic. End of. But RWA? It stands for Research Works Act. It's not the big sexy beast of the other two but it is, in its way, just as insidious and as harmful to the freedom of scientific publishing as SOPA and ACTA are to internet freedom and it's all interconnected. Here's why.

Movie piracy is the next big thing. The RIAA is quickly realising that their reputation is nearly beyond unrecoverable, after taking to court single mums, dead people, and children. In the meantime, in Australia they are having secret meetings to try and work out a way to prevent movie privacy. The solution is simple: to kill movie privacy, allow people to download movies, make it cheap, and make it easy. Yes it's hard. But yes, it's rewarding.

Much of the early development of Sugar took place in the MIT Media Lab. We began in the spring of 2006, in parallel with the work of the teams responsible for developing other aspects of the XO laptop’s software, including device drivers, power management, and security. One might ask how OLPC was able to create an entirely new learning platform from whole cloth, and do so with almost no investment in software engineering. The short answer is that they didn’t. OLPC solved the problem of how to develop the Sugar software with limited resources by attracting external resources—not creating them from scratch—while articulating clearly defined objectives. OLPC built upon decades of research into how to engineer software to promote learning and amplified OLPC’s staff resources by leveraging key partnerships within the Free Software movement.

One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we’ve done it in the past.

During the past week[s], there has been a heated debate on the alleged methods of GPL enforcement as it is performed by the Software Freedom Conservancy on behalf of the Busybox copyright holders. — The extent of license enforcement on Busybox has apparently triggered the proposal to create a non-GPL replacement for it, which in turn has received quite harsh responses e.g. from Matthew Garrett. — It is well-known that the Free Software Conservancy has been actively enforcing the GPL on Busybox. But then, at the same time gpl-violations.org has been (and still is!) similarly active in enforcing the GPL on the Linux kernel. Still, I haven't yet seen calls to write a non-GPL Linux kernel replacement.

If you browse the Web today, your browser will probably download and run nonfree JavaScript software on your behalf. You should be able to say no to that software—but to date, that hasn't been practical. JavaScript License Web Labels are our newest effort to make this easier.

Software is becoming less and less important. Most people today just don't care about what software they use, what operating system they run, or who is behind the pretty screens they see. What they want, is something that works. Or, better, anything that works. This shift caused a series of changes which shook the whole industry. One of them amongst them: are GNU/Linux and free software in general just not cool anymore? Google Trends gives some interesting answers.

Until quite recently, the Linux world had, for the most part, only two major desktop environments: GNOME 2 and KDE. Fast forward to the present, however, and there’s an immense litany of different choices, all vying to become the new face of your open source operating system. To me, this shift signals a new paradigm in the world of free software — a turn that could have major consequences throughout the channel. Here’s why.

Is Compiz dead? I don't really know. Will it ever go away? No. Compiz is still supported by Canonical for Ubuntu, and as long as that remains the case Compiz isn't going anywhere. Has the C++ port had a negative impact on Compiz's userspace? Possibly. Rewrites can and do negatively impact users if they mean long periods without updates. Personally, I think the port opened up development to a wider group of people.

There is a theory in evolutionary biology that reciprocal altruism and cooperation first appeared as a solution to the food storage problem. If you were an early hominid and you killed a large mammoth, you could not possibly eat it all before it rotted. So you shared it. The best bank for your excess capital was your friend’s stomach. That way, you could play banker when your friend killed the next mammoth. — I was thinking of this little idea recently in the context of human wealth. Unless you are a professional investor, places to store surplus capital today where it will even be safe and/or not depreciate too fast are getting incredibly hard to find. — But there is one safe haven, if you know how to invest in it: software developers.

It used to be there were four tiers of work in the United States. The first tier was for the truly uneducated: the illiterate. The second tier was for people who could be counted on to read and write and perform basic math: the high school graduates. Then there were folks who could be counted on to learn a lot more and take up positions of greater complexity: the college graduates. Finally there was a spot in the job market every so often for an expert. — Newsflash: the second and third tier are going away. In it's place is a single tier: people who are literate and are able to control computers. And we're nowhere near ready for the changes coming. — Programming is the new High School Diploma.

The problem is this: Megaupload was accused of violating copyright through its file-sharing technology. This permits users to upload their own content and permit other users into their space. If anything that one person uploads is of uncertain copyright status — it could be anything, really — sharing it would then seem to amount to a crime. —— Which raises the question: Is every site that makes file sharing possible in danger?

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative has historically been more about promise than fulfillment. But in the $100 XO 3.0 tablet, OLPC may have its first product that's not just practical, capable, or cheap. It's actually… good.

Stack Overflow is a great site. every time when a search on a problem takes me there i look forward to the helpful and insightful answers. in ways, posting a question on Stack Overflow is similar to creating a task on RosettaCode.

You know....if this had only happened once, maybe even twice in my personal experience, I wouldn't bother mentioning it. But lately, it has occurred twice in a month's time. I'm not quite sure there's a darned thing that can be done about it, except quietly shake my head and write it off as abacus thinking in a digital world.

This article is not about Steve Jobs. He died this year -- yes, we all know that -- but gone too is Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of the Unix operating system that powers Apple's computers. Also departed are Jack Goldman, the man who came up with the idea to start Xerox PARC, where Jobs got his graphical user interface, Paul Baran, an important Internet pioneer who developed packet switching, and Nobutoshi Kihara, who was known as Sony's "Mr. Walkman," long before Jobs was flogging the iPod.

So here are 11 technology giants who left us this year, and the amazing legacies they left behind.