JD on EP

Re: the ICANN/ITU "Who Should Rule Internet?" debate, Kofi Annan op/eds in WaPo that The U.N. Isn't a Threat to the Net: "One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to 'take over,' police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth." But history shows that promises may need deeper backing. Foreign Affairs has context from the other side of the debate, about what's called the Monroe Doctrine for minimal interference with civilians' Internet use.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes of 10 Issues Facing Web 2.0, noting these as excessive hype, lack of functional definition, need for new showcase sites, need to support occasional connectivity, over-reliance on browser scripting, focusing on production details rather than usage details, co-optation of the marketing label, bad talk/walk ratio, more in the essay and the comments.

Gecko 1.0 Roadmap, in early draft... they hope that this work includes improved graphics and layout capabilities, better JavaScript that seems to be a subset of ECMA-262 specs (hard for me to tell, but sounds like it will continue to share structure with ActionScript 3, although maybe not all the same constructs), better cookies (with discussion of possibly using Flash's shared objects), attempt to handle occasional connectivity, making the browser itself a plugin for other apps, more work done in security, plugin cooperation, debugging. (All this is tentative and early on their part, and subject to reading errors on my part.)

Meanwhile, Simon Willison links to some demos from Jesse Andres of the CANVAS tag, introduced in recent Apple Safari versions and adopted by the beta Firefox 1.5. I can't easily view these at the moment, but I'm intrigued by the idea -- seems like it would be possible to make any browser a CANVAS-supporting browser, through use of ActionScript parsing & drawing routines and a JavaScript dynamic-pagewriting routine, right...?

Dale Rankine writes of how internet telephony is being parasitized by spammers now. (I think architectures work best when the system itself is open to all, but when any individual can block out who they wish, so we don't risk riling the intolerant with unwanted signal. But anti-spam measures need to be handled at the beginning, not after something gets popular enough to be a target.)

Virtual Microsoft in a Firefox tab... wild, but makes sense. (Emulation can help speed testing, but I connections and processors still vary across devices.)

Yahoo Maps spurred some anti-Flash whinging, but what's remarkable is the lack of followup when pressed... leaves the impression that it's a social stance rather than a legit request for improvement -- here, here and here.

Spark Blog has news of the Flash-centric conference in Amsterdam this week.

Ken @ Gizzar "Photoshop is not for web design, but Macromedia Fireworks is": "The Bad Designer Trick is to still use Dreamweaver/Photoshop to do your web designs."

Rich Ziade writes of beyond-the-browser work. Part of the rationale is similar to my data & interface rant, but he also focuses on reduced consumer costs and faster adoption being the real engine behind technical developments.

Bill Gates hits those similar themes of needing better remote services and better interfaces across a better range of devices. (After the audience is assured we can start lowering production costs: compiler comparisons, code-hinting, whatever.)

International Herald Tribune writes of how the rural/urban economic gap is narrowing in India, even as it is increasing in China, and even as the differences widen within rural India itself as its economic ecologies become more complex.

Peter Ent describes the new Flash/Flex interaction at Sys-Con/France.

Tom Foremski writes of anti-syndication, how some engines impose more costs on creators than they return in value.

WikiNotes seems like a single-machine, multi-page text editor, using Wiki editing conventions. I replaced my old home iBook with a PowerBook last month and will probably try this out... at first I was apprehensive of loading executable code from an unknown site, but the source code has been released for modification by others... such transparency helps in trust issues too.

The US Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether local political power is being used to block rival media services. (At one point the digging of cable lines provided a rationale for local political permission...)

Shanghai Daily reports on need for state ID before playing certain networked games... part of the rationale is about "killer" games (related to virtual economies?)... game services are required to set the score of a heavy player to zero after they play a certain number of hours.

Jack Herrington writes of Java at O'Reilly, and digs deep into how dysfunctional beliefs can get in the way of finding the best-fitting tools for a task. "A good engineer has a variety of tools in their toolkit and is always looking for new tools that can speed development." Related: "I direct this to the vocal programming community at large: Why does it take people so damn long to figure out these huge mistakes? I think there is this hubris or pride in the programmer community. If you aren’t doing something really complicated like that other guy, then you aren’t smart... Change the word 'complicated' to 'productive' and see if you don’t get on the right track."

Mohandas Gandhi writes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Not new, maybe, but it just seemed apropos recently.

A Californian is arrested for his 400,000 unit botnet.

A Yahoo Maps piece from Jeremy Zawodny draws this comment about expecting that Yahoo should tie together data from its various services... Jeremy responds that you should be careful what you wish for. Robert Oschler also describes his appreciation of the Maps API there.

Phil Wainewright writes "How many times over should you pay for software?" in regards to pricing models, but seems to have an undercurrent that one size fits all, and doesn't remark that a contract is strongest when it's between two consenting parties. (You may want a service at a one-time price rather than an annual price, and if the other party does not agree, then that opens a space for a new service.)

Ryan Stewart writes of objections to Microsoft, in context of Flex. "When you hire a Macromedia developer who is in touch with the community you get the resources of all the bloggers, newsgroups and Macromedia team members who help out new developers and contribute to the community." Also: "The bread and butter of Flash is that basically everyone has it, and more importantly, everyone upgrades quickly to the newest version." Lengthy reply from Scott Barnes too.

Rick Segal put out a "Macromedia: Corporate-speak is alive" piece, yet didn't come back to pick up comments, even after getting linked late by Scoble. (Rick's a solid guy, I assume this is an oversight, but geez....)