Programmer, Property Tycoon, Media Mogul
Do you use prototype? Sylvain Zimmer has written a performance improvement for the $$ function with a 20 fold improvement!
Google Checkout was launched hours ago. It’s a centralised payment system for multiple online stores, so you don’t have to fill out your delivery details at every store! As this is a mini round-up, I’ll not start listing how much Google know about you now. I’ll leave that to your imagination!
The US Dept of Homeland Security might be given the responsibility of ensuring the Internet doesn’t break. Or something like that.
This article describes how an overseas attacker could send the US into an economic and security crisis, and that someone needs to be responsible for “restart[ing] and restor[ing] the Internet” [John J. Castellani, president of Business Roundtable].
Gosh - I know some people don’t know how the Internet works, but you’d imagine someone would have given the DHS and John J. Castellani a quick lesson before they made a fool of themselves.
Of course, it’s probably not about security, just about economy - the economy of the Government coffers. People hate stealth taxes, so why not disguise it as “yet another counter-terrorism measure”?
For more opinions on this, check out the Digg thread.
Maybe they don’t think so, but as one person commented in the slashdot article, it’s pretty damn close to it!
Essentially, they’re adding a copyright licence in the form of a tax on blank media “including flash memory sticks, blank cd and dvd-rs, even mobile phones and printers”, which will be given to the copyright holder.
I wonder how they know what I’m going to burn on to the CD. If it is copyrighted music, then who gets the royalty? If I’m just backing up my personal files, can I apply for a refund? As making backups for personal use is still legal in Span, will people who have already paid royalties by purchasing the original CD/DVD be able to apply for a refund?
Named in memory of noted Australian web pioneer Nigel McFarlane, the inaugural McFarlane Prize, aims to recognize and encourage excellence in web design by Australian web developers.
I only met him once at the 2004 Open Source Developers’ Conference, and from that brief encounter and hearing what other have to say about him, I think this is a great tribute. Nominations end on August 31st, and only sites that have been launched or significantly upgraded between August 1st 2005 and July 31st 2006 are eligible. I guess I’ll have to wait until next year…
It seems everyone is jumping on the AJAX bandwagon. This bandwagon has covered many miles already, but people keep jumping on board. Hopefully we don’t break an axle!
I found this new, thing, this morning. It’s called Fjax and is touted as being “an open, lightweight, cross-browser methodology for Ajax-style web 2.0 development”. (Note to self - don’t turn this post into a wtf is web2.0 rant.)
It’s Ajax-style - not Ajax itself, and the “clever bit” is that it uses a little embedded flash movie to perform the Ajax-style operations, rather than relying on the browser which might interpret an Ajax library differently to another browser.
So it this good news? WebMonkey interviewed Steve and Jay McDonald of Fjax who mentions “that [Fjax] does it in a fraction of the size, and requires no code forking to work in the different browsers”. Apparently it makes debugging easier too, as you can use the Flash debugger which must be so much better, as Steve challenges anyone to “pull that off in some other Ajax JavaScript development environment”. While it’s been a long time since I last did any Flash work, I’m sure the world of JavaScript debuggers is growing and maturing (Google: javascript debug)
O’Reilly’s Radar has also detected Fjax, and although they experienced problems the first time they went to the site, the errors were caused by server load rather than a problem with the flash script. They reported the system to run well and feel snappy.
Even flashmagazine reckon this could be the next best thing (although they’re slightly biased, I’m sure).
So what’s my take? Well, I personally don’t see this as a great step forward at all. There are many people who still don’t have the flash plugin. While reports say that 97.7% of all PCs have the plugin, there are a growing number of people who disable flash by default or, as in my case, have the plugin installed but it doesn’t work (ok, blame Linux, I know you want to).
The relieving news, for me, is a comment by Steve McDonald in the O’Reilly Radar article, which says that they don’t expect Fjax to replace Ajax, but hope to build a relationship with Macromedia/Adobe, work on some ideas… Not that I don’t want them to succeed, and only market demand can dictate that, but I’m glad that they have a realistic view and sensible approach to this. Good luck to them!