JD on EP

Suck Magazine ran a caustic piece on early plugin history back towards 1996... good for then-current perceptions about NS, MS, plugins vs controls, Acrobat vs Shockwave vs Java, more. (Their layout is still dysfunctional for me... if you're going to break eye-scanning patterns, at least make those little linebreaks meaningful instead of arbitrary....)

"Can I redistribute Macromedia Flash components in other projects?" came up on the Opensource Flash mailing list, and Jesse Warden pointed to the "Supplemental License Terms Relating to Components" page on the Macromedia website. Peter Hall brought up the good advice that, if you need a legal decision, you should get it in writing from a lawyer... the net is good for discussion but not for legal rulings.

The FlashCoders Wiki, which had been corrupted by vandalism (wankers!) has recently been reborn on OSFlash.org.

List of Netscape milestones, history, and early-browser trivia.

The blogsearch thread from various Microsoft staffers over the weekend has great validity for me too... I used to be able to trawl Technorati and other engines to find customer-service issues to resolve, but these days it's 90%+ spam, old postings, and lots more noise. I'm getting skeptical whenever Microsoft staffers discuss another business, though... too many rumors about competitors in some of those Microsoft blogs for my own comfort level.... :(

Similar topic, Ask Jeeves has a piece which sidesteps the question of "How many blogs are there, really?" by instead looking at how many blogfeeds have subscribers. This puts dispersed human judgment into the equation, similar to how Google's pagerank harvested human judgment in the web's links. Seems like a useful way to find how many weblogs actually serve a purpose for someone. (There's currently about 1,120,000 webfeeds to which people have bothered to subscribe.)

Jason Dowdell examines whether opensource/volunteer groups map precisely onto hierarchical/hired groups, and particularly whether the opensource model can create businesses as well as chunks of code.

I'm still not sure why my simple request trying to clarify Dave Shea's article is still unanswered... "Why is it that you’d like to rename device-independence as 'accessibility'?" doesn't seem that hard to answer, but at least now I can clear this page off my desktop.... ;-)

An Adobe page on "Why open standards?" seems sort of superficial to me... VRML97 and HTML 4.01 are actual standards, in ways that CSS and XHTML are not... when I read pages like this one I get an uneasy feeling that the writer may just be repeating words they heard elsewhere, feels like a bit of corporate sucking-up to the public to me. (Then again, you know me, I'm cynical about lots of stuff.... ;-)

There's also apparently a revamped SVG page at the Adobe site, as well as an explanation of Adobe Co-Author which doesn't seem as gritty as other ways to show the Co-Author/Contribute differences. (I'm hoping that whoever wrote those Adobe pages will forget about my observations by the time we're actually working together, of course.... ;-)

David Mendels of Macromedia provides clarification of the timing of ECMAScript for XML delivery... won't be in Maelstrom timeframe, but will be a part of the language in the future.

Forbes has a personal interview with Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop. Not much technical in this piece, but it shows that these are real people building this layer of the stuff.

Rajesh Jain has an excerpt on the tax-funded broadband initiative in Korea... uncompetitive centralism can sometimes work well, particularly if all factors and approaches are already known, but I tend to trust decentralized capitalism more for discovering newer and better solutions to novel problems. That's just me having opinions as a hobby, though... to the best of my knowledge I don't actually run any countries yet, so my opinions are just academic.... ;-)

Tony Gentile wonders about the usability of panning large scans to read newspapers within a web browser page. (I don't think "content is content" is true... the words, the presentation, and the reader's setting all play different roles in the final message which is perceived.)

The Digg news site was getting big linkage this week, and I checked it out over a couple of days, but still don't have a good idea how it warrants the attention... the description fulfills the Minimum Daily Adult Buzzword Requirement ("social bookmarking, blogging, RSS" etc)... I think the core is that committed members can vote stories up for the attention of transient readers, but that risks tyranny-of-the-majority problems with controversial issues.... :(

Uncrate has a bunch of consumer goods I haven't seen elsewhere... I like the Egg & Muffin toaster, it's weird!

Roland Piquepaille had a piece on combining map displays with video footage... I tried to go to the video he linked but had a browser failure. (AVI file which called up the QuickTime Player in Firefox/Win...?)

PCWorld talks about a rugged digital camera from Mattel at $80.

Lawrence Lessig took some flak for noticing that many webloggers ran too far, too fast with mere rumors of political nominees -- I don't want a true believer or a rabid atheist, give me a good ol' agnostic with a realistic perception of what we do and do not know....