So I suppose it is no surprise that the in-crowd is gleeful about the judgment.  It has all of the requisite keywords to invoke the sort of self-satirizing knee-jerk rejectionism that we have come to expect from the cornball neopop blogosphere types that take the time to type these missives (I can be fairly accused of being one of them, too).

But isn’t it time to progress beyond our cliched fear of Microsoft?  The DoJ hurricane blew past their ranch years ago; the company’s dominance in Operating Systems is now respectably challenged by Apple’s OSX and various flavours of Linux (and, if only in vapour, by Google Android); and their web browser is being resoundingly thumped by an influx of not dissimilar offerings from Firefox, Apple, Google, and even Opera.  The Zune is an also-ran MP3 player next to the iPod, and Windows Mobile has become a running joke in the telecom industry while the iPhone has become the dominant player in a little under two years.  The next penny to drop for Microsoft may well be Enterprise apps, with Office and Exchange as the cornerstone.  If someone figures out Shared Calendaring, my friends, that latter jig may be up but soon.

So it’s probably fairer now to conceptualize Microsoft as the aged, embattled warhorse that it is; as bloated and sweaty as its present CEO; both of them a heart seizure waiting to happen.  With billions in the bank it’s hard to feel too sorry for them, but would we be cheering so loudly if the party on the losing end of this patent dispute was any other company?

In recent months the company has been sued by patent holders and licensors over a litany of fairly benign and long-implemented technologies from instant messaging to Windows Update to  its Product Activation System.  Each of these is a clear improvement without which Windows, an already unusable operating system, would be significantly worse.  And so in a worst-case scenario Microsoft is now hampered from delivering you a higher-quality, more innovative product not due to lack of imagination on the part of its engineers, but due to a wellspring of imagination emanating from patent attorneys and their litigious clients.

i4i isn’t strictly a patent troll, but they’re not the original inventors of the technology either.  They are also clearly using this patenet defensively, to prevent Microsoft from encroaching on their market.  This is really an obstacle for anyone who wants to do complex document workflow automation (and lots do).

We actually need for Microsoft to win some of these disputes.  We will all benefit.  Each sets a dangerous precedent that will affect all comers upstream of these cases, and a patent troll armed with a lucrative victory on something so obvious and derivative of open-standards as the ability to edit custom XML is dangerous to the web as a whole and will create a substantial speedbump to innovation.

So maybe just for a while keep your malicious joy in check when reviewing this case.  Microsoft is presently doing the web a favour acting as a breakwater for all of us.  I’ll hold my judgment until we see how they put their own patents in this arena to use (or disuse).

During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.

I spent some time talking last February to Jim Baxter, their VP of Engineering, and there is considerable technology developed for the machine on the user interaction side (the device has one of the best touch-screen UIs I’ve ever seen) and for management of the device, not to mention making the ice cream.  Just so you’re clear:  the ice cream is made fresh while-you-wait, with a wide array of flavors and possible toppings.

As a bonus, the whole thing is run by Linux.  I watched one of their prototypes get absolutely creamed (pun intended) by thousands of people during the DEMO show, to the point where they were resupplying the thing 2 or 3 times a day, and it never once floundered or made a bad sundae.  I’d love to be the franchisee for these in Canada.

Yesterday’s launch of the Palm Foleo probably did not yield the expected huzzahs and praise that normally heralds a product launch from one of Silicon Valley’s product design luminaries, especially one by Mr. Jeff Hawkins. Palm chose to use Mossberg‘s All Things Digital conference in San Diego as a springboard for its media assault, but what should have been a watershed product launch was rapidly overshadowed by a brief chat between two billionaires. The criticism of the Foleo since the buzz started yesterday … and has been nearly uniform in slamming the device.

In fact, the jeers from the peanut gallery are rising to a deafening roar. Carlo Longino @ TechDirt thinks that Palm is done like dinner with this abortion of a product. Even (the fake) Steve Jobs thinks it blows. Much more damaging, though, the mainstream tech press (whatever that is) is joining the chorus: PCmag questions who will buy the thing, InformationWeek calls it a yawn. Matt Hamblen questions whether they did their research. This is actually one of the worst product launches from a large company that I’ve seen in quite a while.

What’s wrong with Palm is difficult to pinpoint. I doubt that, if you did your standard market research, you’d be able to plumb much support for a product like this. However, that’s also true of the original Palm Pilot, which launched on the heels of the death of Apple’s Newton in 1996. And let’s not forget that the Treo practically catalyzed the SmartPhone market all on its own. With these two incredible successes, Jeff Hawkins hasn’t exactly been given the opportunity to learn from his mistakes in being ahead of the curve.

But this time he might. The product smacks of founder-itis. This is an affliction common to mature tech companies and/or startups created by rich tech executives, where the brains behind past successes begin to tinker and approach new design problems, rather than ask questions about what it is that people want. In other words, did Jeff Hawkins run amok and create a big white elephant, simply to amuse himself? Did he sell dazzled co-workers on his vision that the Foleo is the “next big thing”? It’s apparent that they believe it is, given that resources have clearly been diverted from such projects as putting linux on the treo and revving the Treo’s design, which is getting pretty long-in-the-tooth.

The reality is that a company like Palm can only really effectively market one, maybe two, product lines at a time. If there’s a market for the Foleo, the product would be better served by financing, developing, and marketing this proclaimed “mobile companion” externally from Palm, just like the Treo. The Folio’s audience is probably going to turn out to be a LOT different from the Treo’s (one potential market is folks who want email and web on a cheap easy-to-put-away computing device — like seniors) and probably a lot less sexy.

Besides, the Treo (despite the fact that it’s a great product) has yet to really hit it’s stride. This is hard to remember when you visit Silicon Valley, where the Treo is practically ubiquitous. But find someone using a Treo in Europe or Asia (or on the Eastern Seaboard) and you’re just as likely to get struck by lightning.

Either way, the launch of the Foleo (careful to spell it correctly) is not the watershed event that was the Pilot or the Treo… so maybe Hawkins will finally have a mistake from which to learn.

-Ian.

If, in a few weeks, it turns out that Apple’s iPhone is going to become another delicate rosebud in the AT&T Wireless walled garden, there are a number of candidates waiting in the wings for those of us who’ve seen this as the bazaar‘s big chance to topple the cathedral. One of the more interesting ideas is the OpenMoko phone.

Yes, it’s a linux device, and no, there is no way to lock it. Furthermore, you will likely never be able to purchase it from your local wireless carrier for pennies, along with a two-year commitment. When people are looking for carriers and handset makers to break open that walled garden, what they’re really looking for is for mobile devices to be more like PCs (install whatever you want on it, use it the way you’d like to, support it yourself), and for the wireless data connection to be more like the internet (flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, don’t mess with my packets). These are market concepts which are rather foreign to the carriers whose networks we depend on.

OpenMoko, as this presentation attests, is pursuing just that model. Phone-as-PC, with linux and a solid widget/application framework under the hood. Under OpenMoko.org, developers are exchanging ideas and sharing code in a kind of SourceForge for the OpenMoko platform. Backed by Taiwan-based FIC, one of the world’s largest contract technology manufacturers, this platform looks as though it may have some legs, but it will likely hit the market in some other form and via a short list of different name brands. At the moment it’s just a reference design.

The hardware supplied to developers (and only developers at this stage) by FIC is named the Neo1973. It’s powered by a Samsung SoC S3C2410AL 266MHz ARM9. Standard memory includes 128MB SDRAM and an internal NAND flash, with apparent room for more (including via the MicroSD socket). The Quad-band GSM radio unit by Texas Instruments connected by an internal serial bus to the SoC is also pretty spiffy. But wait, there’s more:

• 480×640 Active-Matrix Touchscreen
  
• a WiFi chip is on the horizon, Bluetooth 2.0 built-in
  
• GPS receiver
  

Will this really shake up the market? FIC really seems to hope so, and is investing to make sure it goes somewhere. What’s clear is that with devices like this one, the Trolltech phone, Nokia’s first tentative step with the 770 Internet Tablet, Linux is going to have a startling disruptive effect on existing mobile platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile. And very likely it’ll have the greatest likelihood of putting the wireless companies, especially 3G GSM carriers, in their place.

Time will tell.

-Ian.

I decided once and for all to solve my backup problems. Any backup strategy that I would employ, fundamentally, would have to adapt to the fact that I am lazy and that I am a data packrat. Here’s what I did, and this will work for anyone with OS X or linux, half an hour, and a unix host somewhere that has RSYNC installed properly.

First, I created a dedicated backup account on my DreamHost box (“username”) and gave it shell/ssh access. DreamHost is one of the few services that gives you SSH and Web hosting on a non-dedicated box in my limited searching, but more importantly their basic package gives you 200GB of free storage, which blows away pricing from any of the dedicated OS X backup companies. To create the key and place it on the server I did the following:

From the Command Line (on my machine):

ssh-keygen -d
# hit enter three times and replace “hostname” with your own
ssh username@hostname.dreamhost.com ‘test -d .ssh || mkdir -m 0700 .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 0600 .ssh/*’ < ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub # enter your login password That sets up key-based authentication so that when sshing to the host in the future, it won't need my password. I then created a script on my local machine to back up the folders using rsync, one line per folder to backup. I find rsync extraordinarily complex to do actual syncing but when it comes to just pumping data out the back door on a regular basis, it's super-duper easy. Back to the command line and enter the following: mkdir ~/Scripts # makes a Scripts folder in your home directory cat > ~/Scripts/sync-all
rsync -a ~/Documents username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/
rsync -a ~/Library username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/
rsync -a ~/Projects username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/
rsync -a ~/Movies username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/
rsync -a ~/Music username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/
^D # (that’s a control-D) … now you’ve created a script file that backs up those folders

chmod a+x ~/Scripts/sync-all
# fixes the permissions on the file

… later I wanted to get fancier and wrote a script that also recorded the time and logged each backup … just replace the content of your simpler script file (above) with this using any text editor:

date > ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Documents username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Library username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Projects username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Pictures username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av /Applications username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Incoming username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
rsync -av ~/Scripts username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/ >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log
date >> ~/Scripts/sync-all.log

I then downloaded and installed LingOn, which lets you schedule and manage the rsync process via a GUI:

Here are some screenshots of the config process (this will rsync my Documents folder up to my Dreamhost acct every 10hrs, and do it as low priority so it doesn’t impact other things) but you can season to taste.

Enjoy! Hope this is useful. Thanks to Gersham for kicking this off.

-Ian.

-Ian.

-Ian.

——– http://www.asteriskpbx.com/

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using comparitively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the ‘Features section for a more complete list.

Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk’s sponsors, Digium. Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks. In addition, an analog FXO card is available, and more analog interfaces are in the works.

Also supported are the Internet Line Jack and Internet Phone Jack products from Quicknet.

Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces. Asterisk supports US and European standard signalling types used in standard business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastucture. Asterisk not only supports traditional phone equipment, it enhances them with additional capabilities.

Using the IAX Voice over IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seemlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL information and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information.

Asterisk provides a central switching core, with four APIs for modular loading of telephony applications, hardware interfaces, file format handling, and codecs. It allows for transparent switching between between all supported interfaces, allowing it to tie together a diverse mixture of telephony systems into a single switching network.

Asterisk is primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux for PPC. Other platforms and standards based UNIX-like operating systems should be reasonably easy to port for anyone with the time and requisite skill to do so. Asterisk is available in the testing and unstable debian archives, maintained thanks to Mark Purcell.

Who made this?

Asterisk was originally written by Mark Spencer of Linux Support Services, Inc. Code has been contributed from Open Source coders around the world, and testing and bug-patches from the community have provided invaluable aid to the development of this software.

I walk into Future Bakery on Bloor Street. It’s rather chilly out, and I’ve come out of the cold to check out a meatspace “Meetup,” a gathering of facetime-inclined netizens organized via the recently-created, New York-based Meetup.com. The top three get-togethers in Toronto are all weblog-related: Slashdot, arguably the granddaddy of all blogs; LiveJournal, a site for hosting online journals (a blog by any other name); and Weblogger, whose titular relationship to blogging is self-evident. Fark clocks in at number seven. Yet another free blog-hosting service, Xanga, rounds out the top ten most populous get-togethers in Toronto. To get a feel for what Meetup offers, I’ve pencilled in three of these meetings on my calendar. Although the first (for Ultima Online users in the Greater Toronto Area) simply doesn’t occur because of lack of response, I’m meeting Toronto bloggers tonight at Future Bakery, and a week later I’ll stop in at the Rivoli for the Slashdot crowd.

So I’ve trekked up Yonge and across Bloor to attend the third-largest event, as ranked on Meetup.com, in Toronto. As I emerge from the doorway, I can clearly see a sign that says “Meetup: Bloggers.” I can also see that I’m one third of this group.

Bloggers Tim Campbell and Zhan Huan Zhou make up the rest of the trio. Seated around a small table, they describe their own blogs and experiences with Meetup. Campbell, a self-described “software bohemian,” started his own blog entitled “!?” when he felt his posts to the collaborative news/humour site Fark stopped being significant. “My stuff was just getting lost on Fark.” Zhou maintains several blogs, and is a Masters student in biomedical engineering.

The conversation ranges from domain-name squatting (“Delete.com has recently become available, and is for sale by an Australian domain name company!”), to a list of local blogs (gtabloggers.com), to daily browsing habits. But talk is mostly directed towards topics unrelated to weblogs. The relative merits of living in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal surface. Attendees’ commutes are briefly glossed over. University education and its benefits, such as ample gaming time, get a mention. In fact, this sounds more like a few guys shooting the breeze than a conversation that a group of independent pseudo-journalists might cook up. Campbell says this is typical of his experience with other Meetups as well: “At the Fark Meetup, we went practically the entire night without anyone even mentioning Fark. It’s just an excuse to get together and talk.

“If it weren’t for Meetup, I wouldn’t have met any of the GTA bloggers.”

At this point, two young women in bicycle gear approach our table. The word “blog,” with its amputated-portmanteau quality, has piqued their interest. “What’s a blogger?” Needless to say, a lengthy explanation follows.

After they walk off, Tim remarks, “This sign is a real chick magnet.” I chuckle to myself and ask him and Zhou about their experience with Meetup. While both are supportive of the Meetup concept, they both had sharp criticisms of its current execution. “I think Meetup’s stupid. No one comes out,” says Zhou. “There are so many parallel groups, like the GTABloggers and Yahoo! Groups, that get together on their own. It doesn’t have to be a specific date or anything, so if someone can’t make it they can change the date.”

Tim’s main complaint is the site’s layout. “I mean, we can agree on one thing: Does the design suck, or does it suck? When every page of your site needs a FAQ, that’s a sign that you’re in trouble. Plus, I can’t tell when I’m logged in or logged out, nothing’s clear. It says on their site that they’re hiring. They should hire a graphic designer, as soon as possible.”

Tim then goes out for a smoke. As the door closes behind him, another young woman approaches our table to ask what a blogger is. I shake my head, thinking to myself, “Damn, what if this thing really is a chick magnet?”

The basic idea behind Meetup, as explained by public-relations representative Myles Weissleder, is to help gatherings of common interest groups around the world. Based in New York, the idea behind Meetup crystallized during the shock following the September 11th catastrophe. “A large part of the impetus to create Meetup stemmed from the general feeling of ‘community disconnect’ in NYC after 9/11. It’s also a ploy from a bunch of self-proclaimed computer/internet geeks to help people get away from their computers and their TVs and back into the real world — something that we tend to forget exists.”

After departing from the friendly intimacy of the bloggers, I’m still curious. On another night of the month, I visit the Slashdotters. I can’t climb the Rivoli’s stairs without the loud music reminding me of Tim’s complaint about events here — it’s loud and hard to talk. After I step into the room, a man with a Blackberry greets me and cheerfully tells me that this is the largest Slashdot Meetup in the world. In fact, according to Weissleder, this is the largest Meetup in the world, period. One of the previous meetings drew fifty-nine confirmations from registered users on Meetup.com, setting an all-time record on the site. Tonight, my appearance brings the grand total of attendees to nine, which will later hit a high watermark of twelve.

The seemingly lackluster turnout rekindles some doubts I had about the entire Meetup concept. On its website, the company predicts income will come from two sources: retailers who host Meetups, and “upcoming extra-cool features” that should increase future revenues. But Meetup.com does not carry any advertising, so is money actually being made? According to Weissleder, “We’re making a little bit of money. We’re young (launched in June 2002) and fully expect it to take some time before we start raking in the bucks. [But] seriously, we’ve got a business model that is being proved every day. We’ve been funded by some angels and are closing a round of smart VC money as I [speak].” The Meetup site mentions prospective venues paying for placement during the venue selection process, but the low numbers beg the question: How big do Slashdotters (and bloggers, and Ultima Online players) tip?

When I take a look at the Slashdot tables, stocked with plates of spring rolls and glasses of beer, Myles’ business model seems a little more plausible.

I sit down, and conversation is already in full swing. The air is buzzing with talk about the Washington sniper and media scapegoating of videogames. Attendees avidly discuss an article posted on Penny Arcade, a popular gaming site, which meant to predict such phenomena, but eerily coincided with it instead. Conversation moves on to luminaries in the Linux and Open-Source communities, such as people’s opinions of Richard Stallman, and personal experiences with meeting Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

The group’s composition is entirely male and overwhelmingly knowledgeable. The conversation really starts to heat up when new features of the most recent Linux kernel upgrade are mentioned. Soon, esoteric terms and jargon fly around the table like a whirlwind. Excited chatter fills the air. “They’ve totally rewritten the SCSI stuff. The buffers are completely new. And the UML — Oh! the UML!” The very mention of User Mode Linux steers the conversation into a cavernous vein. Soon, the Slashdotters are elbow-deep in a discussion of virtual Linux kernel simulation, a concept akin to simulating multiple operating environments, each stacked within another, like a series of nested Russian Matryoshka dolls.

Around the other side of the table, two highschoolers are describing a unique way of taking care of their curriculum’s forty hours of artistic activity per term requirement. They’ve convinced their instructor that a weekend-long interactive webcast of them hanging out is artistic enough to qualify, and they’re discussing technical minutiae of streaming with the other techies seated in the booth.

This evening, no random young women stop by the booth and tables to ask what Slashdot is. However, there is no sign at this Meetup. Still, as I look around the table and listen to the aural, real-time equivalent of Slashdot postings, one thing is clear: Chick-magnet or no, Meetup has managed to fuel personal encounters of like-minded people who may never have met otherwise. Whether it will survive or become profitable in the future is unclear, but it’s certainly fascinating to watch.

-Ian.

—– http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/

Jeff Raskin: About The Humane Environment

There is a common misconception that The Humane Environment (THE) is just a hyper-efficient editor. It is not. So THE is not an editor… what is it? <a wider range of users.

But interfaces have not moved with changing times. After a decade of research into cognitive psychology and by paying attention to people’s constant computer complaints (and his own annoyance), Raskin realized that today’s GUIs are fundamentally flawed. The interface-building tools that companies and open-source prouducts provide enforce bad interface design practices. They are wrong. Period. Raskin figured out how to fix the problems. His popular book, /The Humane Interface/ <)”>http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/manual.html>) before you unlearn your present habits and can begin to appreciate it. You are in a worse position for learning it than a novice who has only to acquire new habits and has nothing to unlearn!

But once you have learned THE, you will wish that all your software had at least some of its interface features. This we guarantee; it happens every time.

After you’ve used THE, you may well be motivated to add new commands, critique what we’ve done, port it to other platforms (it is on the Mac right now, but a lot is written in platform-independent Python <.”>http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/index.html>. For experience, try the software. You can visit the projects SourceForge page here <.”>http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_idW603>.

(signed) Aza Raskin Bug List <“>http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/spec.html> Before going on to the design of the visually-oriented zooming portion of The Humane Environment (THE), it seems wise to specify the low-level interactions that take place within the document-centric portion. Also, this portion allows interaction by the visually impaired. We specify first that software necessary to demonstrate LEAP and some of the selection and command interface techniques and other benefits described in “The Humane Interface” [Raskin, 2000]. THE is intended to run on at least Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. This specification describes the first portions to be implemented and gives some indications for future directions. Joining the THE Team <“>http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/manual.html> The user manual, written for developers of the Humane Environment

Mission Statement <“>http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/spec.html> Using CVS and Sourceforge.net <4098