Category — General

i have not been able to find out what this feast is on the web, any ideas? oh today's the day, seems like a good day to celebrate, and apparently this is the celebration of the day, but what is it?

i found it on my jubilee saints calendar from autonomedia.org

RSS Tutorial.

A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers. The benefits of RSS as outlined in the document:

RSS is an excellent and cost-effective way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any website that publishes content (e.g news, jobs, events) regularly. Once a publisher produces an RSS file, they are enabling others to syndicate their headlines, without any further work on their part.

RSS is the dominant format for distributing headline content on the Web.

RSS allows easy sharing of data between sites. Webmasters can use an RSS file to easily incorporate third party content into their own site.

Content from RSS feeds can be easily repurposed allowing, for example, cross searching of a number of different feeds at once.
RSS content can be added to personal desktop news reading applications like Feedreader or AmphetaDesk.

RSS is a disruptive innovation – where HTML was in 1994.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

RSS is an interesting development for sure, and i find it extremely useful

Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design, by Rob Pegoraro,
The Washington Post.

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printer-friendly version [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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everyone knows about this, but what people have to realize is that microsoft isn't just at fault, that networkwise, microsoft systems can more or less be weaponized with ease. they are not built to be a trusted platform they are mean to be like easy to play with kid toys, but the problem is that these toys are choke hazzards.

They Think Its All Over. It looks like this flashmob thing is just about over. The penultimate one has been held in New York …. [iWire]

yes, it probably is 'over' as in 'no longer cool' but it is somewhat interesting.

The Real Getaway Tour. The Getaway is a game for the PS2 set in a realistically modelled representation of London. You'd have to be really bored to go and find all the locations in the game and re-create the missions for real, wouldn't you? [MetaFilter]

ok, granted, i don't like the getaway, it was a sucky game that did not rely on thought at all, just the ability to adequately handle the controller, that is a bad game to me. but this at leat makes something about it interesting.

May you rest in peace mazeone.

Mike Lea aka mazeone on #joiito took his own life on Friday. He worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He recently started hanging out on #joiito and was a pretty active participant in our community. I think he spent more time on #unixpunx. The #unixpunx site says that Vixnix talked to his sister who said to pass this on:

Mike's sister

I wish I could tell you differently, but it is true. He has been very depressed for such a long time. I went down there and stayed with him last weekend and he was just miserable. He did it this past Friday night. He was ready to go. And he's at peace now. I wish I knew what to say. I know you all will miss him, and I know that his irc friends meant a lot to him and he enjoyed talking with you all. He kept trying to get me to go on and meet all the people he enjoyed so much. I'm so glad you all were there for him. I wish it wasn't true either. Feel free to forward this to his irc friends and know that my heart is with you all in missing his wit and him.

mazeone, may you rest in peace…

this happens too often, i've met too many people on irc that chose this end, in #virtue, in #philosophy, in #philosophicus, and now, #joiito, i just don't understand it, there is always so much possibility in the world for this option to be real. may they all rest in peace.

Psst, wanna get a deal on software?

Educational versions of software sell at greatly reduced prices. They are exactly the same as the commercial versions! You're supposed to be a student to qualify for buying them, however gray market educational versions of software are freely available at many computer shows, no questions asked.

The savings can be major. For example, at a recent L.A. computer show the educational version of a popular high end program went for $250. The full commercial version goes for $900 and the upgrade is $450.

Educational software is available in full version only, with no upgrade version. This is because the price is already is so low it's pointless to also have an upgrade version.

[Politics in the Zeros]

the key bit here is that when using academic priced software, you cannot!!! use it for profit, the license is clear.

A public service announcement. Attention data archivists… CD-R's go bad. A dutch study indicates that most CD-Recordable discs become virtually unreadable 20 months after being written. [MetaFilter]

this is good to know

20, 000 Leagues Under. Iâm going to make a Jules Verne prediction for the future. In the next 10 to 15 years, many of the mid-level colleges are going close and reopen as cyber schools. The University of Phoenix has been very successful at… [Invisible Adjunct]

I am not that optimistic, i don't see them closing and opening anew. I see them being surpassed by people that already do cyberschooling very well, and thus eventually closing.

Ted Agres, The Costs of Commercializing Academic R …. Ted Agres, The Costs of Commercializing Academic Research, TheScientist, August 25, 2003. Excerpts: “The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allows US universities and research institutes to patent and commercialize discoveries financed with federal funds, may inadvertently hinder scientific research and impede innovation, scientists and legal experts say….Some legal experts contend that Bayh-Dole actually blocks scientific research when institutions claim ownership of fundamental discoveries and processes, such as new DNA sequences, protein structures, and disease pathways.” [Open Access News]

I think the real area where you see this stagnation originally is in information technology shortly after the act was passed. Has anyone seen any studies on the Bayh-Dole effects or is this one of those things that the Office of Technology Assessment was closed for, so no one would study it…