I am a member of many communities, this being one and an important one. One of my theories (and I have a LOT of theories!) is that the measure of how commited a person is to a community is there willingness to accept dissenting points of view. I think that I am pretty tolerant, but I resolve to be even more so in the future. Why? Because this community is important to me. I come here to write, to express my thoughts and opinions. I also come here to read, to learn about other points of view a...
This may be surprising, but did you know that Google has released a browser? They call it Mozilla. The Mozilla Project states its purpose as follows: The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. An open source community of developers and testers. A partner for the technology industry. An advocate for standards on the Net who provides tools for developing standard web content. Educators, providing educational materials about Internet techn...
This article is a really interesting take on today's events at Macworld. On stage with Steve Jobs were Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel and Roz Ho, GM of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. CNN author Owen Thomas suggests that this is the beginning of an alliance aimed at Google, Yahoo and smaller players like Six Apart and Odeo. I had never thought of it that way. But even the casual observer has to acknowledge that there have been strange tech alliances over the past years. Microsoft's App...
Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law H.R.3402, the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005. Among other sections is "a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity." A number of journalists, including Declan McCullagh of CNET see this as threatening free speech. Mr. McCullagh went so far as to say "This ridiculous prohibition, would likely imperil much of Usenet." I don't...
...Google. News of a new Google service that takes aim at eBay has been leaked. The service, called Google Base, would allow people to sell goods and services without paying for advertising. Google has also confirmed that it is working on an on-line payment service, but denies that that service will compete with PayPal. (Editor's comment: Cough cough. And Google Talk won't compete with Skype either.) Google's official statement is as follows: "We are testing new ways for content owne...
If you browse the Internet (and if you don't you're not reading this!) the websites that you visit ultimately get their names from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.) ICANN is a non-profit agency, based in California. Which means that they are regulated to one degree or another by the US Commerce Department, a part of the US Government. Which means that the US Government controls the Internet. And some nations have a problem with that. Countries such as Brazil a...
It has been a while since I have written one of these articles combining two of my favorite topics: Software and Free Things. In the past, they have turned collaborative, with members of the community adding their favorite programs and often teaching me. I hope that this time is no different. I recently played with a couple of Linux distros, starting off with Live CDs (and Live USB installs) and then decided to install Ubuntu on a partition. Ran it quite happily for a while alongside Windows ...
The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of "What is a Jew?" and also "Who is a Jew?" Questions that have been asked many a time.....mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes....well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world's population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our...
Google has filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice and the European Union, complaining that IE7, which uses MSN as the default search engine, will give Microsoft an unfair advantage. Since Google is the default search engine for both Firefox and Opera, and pays those organizations for that position, in essence Google is complaining that Microsoft is acting like...well, like Google. The complaint is reminescent of Netscape and Real's complaint against Microsoft in the 1990's. Bo...
"1 in 5 kids online is sexually solicited. Online predators know what they're doing. Do you?" read the public service ads that began running Monday. I hate to post just quotes, but in this case the story says it all. "Some 22 percent of users are registered as under 18, according to MySpace. The site forbids minors 13 and under from joining and provides special protections for those 14 and 15 -- only those on their friends' list can view their profiles. The company uses a compute...
Microsoft has released for public download the second Beta of the next version of their Internet browser. I have downloaded and installed the Beta 2 of IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) and so far I like the experience very much. Key Features: Tabbed Browsing, a Streamlined (and highly configurable) user interface, greatly improved security, RSS feed support, toolbar search box. For a full feature list see Link (Some IE7 features will not be available until Vista rolls out. Killer Feature:...
The CNN lead to this story reads "Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Cisco came under sharp attack from leaders of Congress and human rights advocates for aiding China's efforts to censor the Internet and punish dissidents." Having read the story, it is more apt to describe what happened as the major companies that, to large measure control the Internet, refused to attend a scolding. But....I post the story because of the wider implications. On one hand, the Internet stands poised as the gre...
Some of the largest companies on the Internet, Google, Sun and Lenovo, have formed a group to expose and publicly shame the makers of Spyware, Malware and other programs that do "bad things" to our computers. Toward this end, they are going enlist the help of Web users to create an on-going list. A good idea in theory, but while further announcements and details are still going to come forth, let me express some reservations. Hopefully these will be addressed as further information goes ou...
This article is written for my co-teachers at the Jewish Cultural School Link and to illustrate how technology in general and the Internet specifically provides tools to enhance the educational experience. Aside from providing examples, I will also include links to software programs and web sites that I find useful. What can you, as educators, do on the internet? You can do up-to-the-minute research, link to current events, link to sources and research sites, include pictures, sounds and...
Today is my last official day as a full-time Stardock employee; although there will be a transition period of some length where I'll still be around (what I like to refer to as the "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in" time) but as of Monday I will primarily be a GameStop employee. I joined Stardock more than a decade ago, in February 2001. During my tenure, I was a part of the release of WindowBlinds for XP (that became WindowBlinds 3) at the Microsoft offices outside D...