In all the Microkia hub-bub of late, as the best of Redmond and the pride of Tampere hold hands and blaze a trail to smartphone domination, the word " Zune" never once came up. This didn't escape the notice of many, including MS guru Paul Thurrott and ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley, who inquired to someone at Microsoft about just what's going on -- whether indeed the brand is indeed being killed off. This is the non-denial that came back:
We're not 'killing' any of the Zune services/features in any way. Microsoft remains committed to providing a great music and video experience from Zune on platforms such as Xbox LIVE, Windows-based PCs, Zune devices and Windows Phone 7, as well as integration with Bing and MSN.
Makes sense to me. If they want to push Windows Phone 7, for instance, they need to have music (etc) be integrated with that. Right now, they have a confusing set of products that needs to be rationalized around the successful XBox, IMHO
Bethesda will launch new downloadable expansions for Fallout: New Vegas in the coming months, the publisher said Friday on its official blog. It will launch the packs simultaneously for Xbox360, PC and PlayStation 3. These three packs are in addition to the first New Vegas downloadable expansion, Dead Money, which will be available for PS3 and Steam on February 22. Xbox 360 owners can already purchase the DLC.
Peter Shankman makes a good point about the "new rules" we live under:
Transparency has to rule the day. You need to go through life, both business and personal, assuming that someone has a camera on you at all times. A bit sad? Sure. But it’s the world in which we live.
You can see that in the almost daily stories about people filming police - those stories tend to get pitched by the police as "public safety" things, but it really boils down to what Peter is on about: enforced transparency.
The same thing is happening everywhere. You can't move ahead with an ossified business plan where you try to keep everything secret. If you're big enough, it'll leak anyway. If you aren't, you'll simply disappear into the background, as the few people who do spot you will immediately move along, in search of more transparent business partners.
It doesn't matter whether you like this - it's just the way it is. The genie isn't going back in the bottle.
We'll look at loading your code into a fresh image in the next screencast. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Pharo Smalltalk is ready for the next step ahead in terms of commercial acceptance and viability - I saw this on the ESUG mailing list, from the Pharo board:
We are pursuing an effort to bring Pharo to the next level: we will set up a consortium of pharo users and industrial partners. Our goal is to build a legal infrastructure that will be able to sustain the development of Pharo and improve its future. As an example, we would like to be able to collect funds (ways as to be determined - we foresee a membership model or moral license) to pay engineering tasks to be performed such as improving the virtual machine, network libraries, better JIT support. To make it short we would like to give a chance to our community to grow and structure itself so that Pharo can get stronger and that risk (truck factor) gets minimized.
It should be interesting to watch that and see how it develops. For many years, the various Smalltalk vendors simply didn't take the open source Smalltalk community seriously. Gemstone has been taking it more seriously of late, but I don't think much has changed elsewhere. If this effort makes headway, that'll have to change.
I think that Apple's latest restrictions on subscriptions - that vendors have to sell through the app store, and can't provide a link to external services - is going to cause a lot of problems. Rhapsody is is the first to complain, but I doubt they'll be the last. I can hardly wait to see what Amazon does with the Kindle app (if it applies to Amazon; that's unclear right now):
Rhapsody has issued a statement, which says that it's not going to play ball and even levels a bit of a threat: "We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development." The big trouble stems from the fact that Apple requires anybody offering a subscription service to offer that service for the same price or less through Apple. That means you can still sign up folks through your own methods and get all the cash, but if anybody signs up through your app, Apple gets a 30 percent cut. In addition, Apple is no longer allowing applications to include a link to an external site for purchasing, which means vendors will have trouble getting new users to pay them directly instead of using Apple's simple but heavily-taxed option.
This is going to get uglier for Apple as more vendors start to follow Rhapsody's lead. I tend to be very cynical about government involvement in this sort of thing, but this much is clear: Apple really, really shouldn't want that kind of attention.
David Meerman Scott thinks that companies that block various social media sites are going to face uprisings of a sort:
I'm wondering when will companies that block employee access to social networks go through the same sort of revolution as Egypt? I think it will be soon. These companies are ripe for uprising.
Well - not so much. Sure, it's irritating to not be able to get to various things in a locked down environment, but - what are you going to do? Tell your spouse that you were willing to lose your job (and risk your mortgage, etc) because you couldn't get to YouTube?
The way this might play out will be slower and less obvious. As younger people used to the "always on" culture rise through the ranks, a lot of the restrictions will drop away. The companies that stay locked down will have a harder time hiring (assuming the job market eventually loosens up, of course). In the meantime, I seriously doubt you'll see job actions over this kind of thing.
With the CloudforkSSO library you can let the users of your Seaside web application login using their Google or Yahoo accounts. This works using the OpenID2 protocol. CloudforkSSO also contains OAuth support. With this protocol you can ask users for permission to access their data on other websites.
I recall some real hassles implementing OAuth against Twitter - I was never sure whether I was at fault, or whether Twitter was - it worked sometimes. It's nice to see someone else has done the heavy lifting :)
Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we take a look at constructors for Javascript object creation. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You takes a another look at Autocompletion in Pharo - you can modify the way it behaves based on a few simple preference options. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Flash 10.2 will be coming to both tablets and smartphones "in the next few weeks." Come again? You see, Adobe Flash 10.2 uses fewer CPU cycles to play back web video, likely providing better battery life in Android devices (and BlackBerry tablets), but Adobe told us it can't support the function in earlier versions of the Android OS -- Google had to specifically add new capabilities in Honeycomb to let Flash 10.2 take full advantage of hardware.
Sounds to me like Apple's criticisms hit Adobe where they live, and inspired them to improve things. When the next rev of Android and Flash arrive together, it might make Apple have to think.
Welcome to episode 17 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week I have a a talk from ESUG 2010 - Martin McClure of Gemstone.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Welcome to episode 17 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week I have a a talk from ESUG 2010 - Martin McClure of Gemstone.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
I'd like to call Squeak 4.2 finally officially released now. I posted the first maintenance "fix" to the squeak42 repository the other day, so our process for applying maintenance updates has been tested, in case we should need any more. I'm still waiting for final web-site updates from Janko, but I see no reason to postpone announcing any longer.
Michael pointed out to me that there was a two minute dead space in the podcast - during the call, skype dropped out and I left the recording running to keep things in synch. Later, I neglected to edit the dead space out. I reposted the audio files, and updated the original posts, so if you grab episode 17 now, everything should be cool.
In case anyone thinks that the music piracy argument is new - not so much. Before iPods and CDs, there was the mix tape:
I guarantee I am not the only one with a couple of tapes marked "Road Tunes" for playing while cruising the highway. For a while I was in the habit of buying an LP, listening to it a couple of times, and then putting the tracks onto a tape in an order I found pleasing. You may roll your eyes now, I don't care.
For me, it was less for road trips and more for college parties - how else could I ensure that a Blue Oyster Cut track or two made it into the soundtrack?
Welcome to episode 17 of "That Podcast: An FNV Diary" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith and I document our trials and tribulations in Fallout: New Vegas.
On today's podcast, I'm joined by guest host Michael Fincher again. Now that I've finished "Dead Money" properly, we took another look at it, start to finish. I built a new character with this DLC in mind, and that's what we spoke about.
Got feedback? Send it to James. We'd really appreciate it if you head on over to iTunes and leave a comment - enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in the wastelands!
Welcome to episode 17 of "That Podcast: An FNV Diary" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith and I document our trials and tribulations in Fallout: New Vegas.
On today's podcast, I'm joined by guest host Michael Fincher again. Now that I've finished "Dead Money" properly, we took another look at it, start to finish. I built a new character with this DLC in mind, and that's what we spoke about.
Got feedback? Send it to James. We'd really appreciate it if you head on over to iTunes and leave a comment - enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in the wastelands!
On the sunny side of the Alps we have a spring already, so let me bring a bit spring to you too with this new Aida release :) Fresh features from last month:
Today's Smalltalk 4 You takes a look at autocompletion in Pharo. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
One of the things that's been a real revelation to me in this job is the whole "how the other half lives" thing. What do I mean by that?
Well, back when I worked at Cincom, it was pretty easy for me to push stuff out to the web,and to access whatever I wanted to see on the web. I worked from home, on a machine I had full access to. At this new job, I'm seeing how things are for software developers in big shops:
Locked down, developer level access only Windows clients
Firewalls that block everything - streaming media, tons of blog sites, anything related to video games, and so on
Now, the blockage makes sense to the IT department - after all, you don't want your proxy server taken down when everyone wants to watch the latest viral YouTube video. On the other hand, it makes it clear to me how some of what I was doing at Cincom didn't always reach the target audience. Tutorial videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook? Blocked. Public Store Repository? Blocked. Heck, the only reason that the audio and video I hosted on the Cincom servers is accessible is because that site isn't a "known" streaming service.
Fortunately, I still have my personal machine, and once I get to working at home more often I'll be back on the public net more continuously. For people working fulltime in a large organization's office though? The wider net really only exists before and after work, and that means in between family obligations.
That's why all of the social media outreach I'm so in favor of can't be the only thing you do. At this point in time, there are still a ton of people who won't ever see it - at least during working hours.
I'd have more sympathy for Tim Bray's rant about ajax usage and weird url strings if twitter.com/timbray fell on the floor. But look gang - it actually goes to his twitter stream. Sure, along the way it redirects to the funky hashbang url and picks up the ajaxified stuff he goes on about, but still - the simple url actually works.
Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we take a look at creating your own Javascript classes. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You takes a look at the process model in Smalltalk. While the screencast uses Pharo, the same principles apply across at least Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and VisualWorks. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
I can't get the daily screencast posted - my MBP seems to be unable to connect to the wifi here (even though every other device I have can). This leads me to believe that I have a hardware issue of somekind. I have a call into Apple, but with the ice/snow storm in progress here in Dallas, I doubt I'll make it to the Apple store until I get back home. Sigh.
Update: The good news is, it's not the Mac - I walked a short distance to a McDonalds, and the wifi connects just fine. The bad news is, I now need to talk to (probably clueless) hotel staff. Bah.
is coming, and "Dead Money" will be on PS3 and Steam soon - February 22nd. 
