The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
O'Reilly says that "cloud computing" is now where "web apps" were a few years ago - they are what "everyone" is working on:
For many years at OSCON we called out "web applications" as a distinct topic. This year it became a useless demarcation, as just about everything is a web application. Cloud computing is in a place similar to web applications a few years ago.
Technorati Tags: open source, cloud
Maybe Apple as a whole has a distortion field, only it's reaching out into reality:
The Wall Street Journal reports (with its usual paywall shenanigans) that both CBS and ABC will be streaming TV shows to the iPad. CBS will opt for video that you can watch through Safari on the iPad--as we reported last week, the network has already been running tests of HTML5-served video. As of Saturday, when the iPad launches, CBS plans to have full episodes of popular reality show Survivor available, as well as clips from other shows. At some point in the future, however, the network is shooting for full parity between what's offered on its standard Website and on the iPad.
I suspect that the iPad we bought will get a lot of use for streaming TV...
I upload the Smalltalk Daily video to YouTube (amongst other places) every morning - but today, here's what I'm seeing for YouTube:
I've never seen that before. The funny thing is, embedded videos on my sight still work - so they aren't completely down.
Update: Whatever it was, it's over. YouTube is back up. I noticed this when the outage was nearly over - TechCrunch also reported on it.
Technorati Tags: youtube
This can't be good news for Adobe's desire to keep Flash as the "default" web video standard:
The Open Video Alliance, which includes Mozilla, Kaltura, Miro, and Yale Law School, are joining forces to bring video to Wikipedia -- Flash-free.
So consider - Google (and YouTube) are going with non-Flash solutions, Apple has already ditched Flash (and because they won't support it on the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, they are forcing change). Now Wikipedia is planning to move off Flash. I think I'm glad I went with H.264 for the daily screencasts awhile back :)
Mark Bernstein writes about something I noticed yesterday, but was too tired (more driveway clearance) to comment on: the way an awful lot of people use the web:
The comments of this page are now filled with users who, one after the other, googled “facebook login” in order to log into Facebook. That’s how they use the Web; the Google and assume that the first listing is what they want. When they see this article, they don’t say,
Oops! This is an article about logging into Facebook! I’m in the wrong place!No indeed. They assume that this is some strange new Facebook design, and they don't like it one bit.
It's easy to sit back, as someone who knows his way around the net (and pretty much only associates with other people of similar knowledge bases) and think "everyone knows what an url is". Then you run into something like what Mark commented on, and you really have to sit back and consider things. When I first ran through the comments, I was sure that the "where's my login" thing was a few people having fun. But then the comments kept going, and going... until it became clear that no, for a lot of people, Google is the net. Things haven't progressed as far past the old days of the AOL walled garden as I might of thought - for a lot of people, the net consists only of what Google turns up in the first page, or even just the first few results. The rest of it may as well not exist.
First, after Apple's iPad announcement with no Flash, Adobe's Evangelist pulled out the pr0n card:
My friend Matt Drance, Apple's former iPhone evangelist, summed up what this means on Twitter:"Adobe has resorted to playing the porn card. It's over."
Following a link from there, John Gruber noted:
Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.
Finally, I came across this thoughtful piece on the problem, which explains that Adobe is actually stuck in C++ legacy-land, while Apple wants developers to work in Objective-C:
Can Adobe just port what they have into Objective-C or use Carbon. Unfortunately no, the Flash Player is written in C++ and going from C++ to Objective-C is not very practical. Objective-C is just another superset of C. It simply adds some OOP logic and a messaging and some of the syntax is similar to Smalltalk. You can compile any C program into Objective-C but that's not currently possible to do with a C++ program
Based on all of this, I've rethought my theory - I don't think Apple will need to reconsider Flash at all. I think Adobe is going to have to reconsider where they stand. Mind you, I've had it pointed out (via Rob Fahrni) that you can, in fact, compile C++ in an Objective-C environment. Based on his post, it still sounds like Adobe has a rather large mountain in front of it...
The future of video is streaming - even ATT has caught up with that fact:
But all that is about to change. AT&T announced Thursday morning that it will now allow the SlingPlayer iPhone app to stream live over its 3G network.
What we really need now is for Apple to release streaming support for iTunes and the iPhone. Then add over the air updates instead of requiring the synch cable. Google has done that for their Android phones, and Apple needs to catch up.
I have a question - you can either email me, or leave comments if you want to answer it :) When you go to a site, and see an an offer to watch a video, or read a document (assume for the sake of argument that it's about something of interest to you) - how do you react to a mandatory form? Do you:
I know how I react, but I'm curious as to how other people see this.
While it's great that non-Latin characters will be usable for domain names starting this year (why should Arabic users, for instance, have to use the Latin alphabet?), there are some interesting scam/phishing opportunities that will crop up.
Mashable explains:
this international progress also has some potentially disastrous opportunities for scammers and phishing sites. This is because of the characters that render the same way (despite different meanings) in different scripts. For instance, Cyrillic scripts, which is the basis for the Russian language, shares some of the same letterforms as the Latin alphabet. What this means is that potential evil-doers could register a domain using non-Latin characters that appears to spell out a Latin word.
They include this image to demonstrate:
Looks like we'll all have to pay really close attention to links for awhile...
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