Aehso’s Output

Or so it would appear. Three quotes in 9 of 10 teens now using the Internet, a bland piece on teens use of technology, managed to shock me this morning:

“I’ve got my own cell phone, and I’m on it two or three hours a day,” said 12-year-old Omarah Scott of Chicago. “I talk to my friends, mostly about our plans.”

Our plans??? For what exactly, world domination? You’re 12 years old! There are world leaders who don’t spend three hours a day and they still manage!

Then there’s

“My grandmother barely knows how to turn on the computer, and they didn’t have cell phones in her day,” said Dominique Daily, 14…

They didn’t have cell phones when I was in college - well they did, but they had car batteries attached to them. I hope that wasn’t “my day”!?!?

And lastly.

They think e-mail is something used to talk to “old people.”

Man, I have seriously got to get with it. So from now on, I’m going to blog from my cell phone, and have an eighty year old right thumb by the time I’m thirty. Or, maybe not.

Via Dave Winer, a sensible commentary on podcasting by the people by Greg Linsay.

Winer obviously disagrees though - the “Columnist Greg Lindsay trashes podcasting by the people” headline kinda gives that away! The article doesn’t ‘trash’ podcasting by the people - it just states that there won’t be much money to be made out of the practice. I didn’t notice any comment by Linsay on the quality of these podcasts. He is just highlighting that the corporate world is awake to blogging and podcasting and are already adapting to the new channels faster than with any previous channel, and they are already grabbing eyeballs.

In fact, the ‘rebuttal’ article subsequently referenced by Winer only re-enforces this assertion! I’m not sure what point Winer wanted it to make, but the assertion that corporate blogging will be the death of traditional journalism is nonsense. If Winer’s main beef is with advertising then he has got his blinkers on. Many ‘independent’ blogs and podcasts advertise products either directly or indirectly and lets not forget the recent ‘expirements’ with advertisments in RSS feeds.

It looks like RTE don’t have a published policy document on DTT but Sarah Hegarty, RTE Corporate Communications Co-Ordinator kindly sent me the following note:

At this stage RTE has noted the Government’s call for expressions of interest in the DTT trial and welcomes the Government’s decision to carry out a trial.

RTE’s stated policy is to be platform neutral - which means that our objective is to ensure that our content is available free to air and on a universal basis to all our licence fee payers. Around 37 percent of the viewing population in Ireland rely on terrestrial television so particular consideration would have to be made to ensure that those citizens still have an opportuniy to access free to air services.

Therefore DTT as a free digital alternative to Pay TV is a proposition to be welcomed in terms of the national interest. We await the outcome of the Government-led trial.

Via Ted Neward’s excellent disassembley of Floyd Marinescu’s A Brief History of EJB, I stumbled across Peter Deutsch’s old Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Back in the day in Iona, being caught in possession of a list like that would probably have gotten me fired (kidding), but I do remember reading it and thinking “uh oh, we may be missing something here”. Developers building any type of SOA/ESB SOAP/REST based server, tools or solution would still do well to print it out and put it somewhere prominent.

Funnly, it’s almost like Sun are trying to hide the list since the common link returned by Google is broken.

Got a response from ComReg:

There is new legislation in relation to unsolicited calls so please click on the following consumer guide from our consumer website at www.askcomreg.ie for information on unsolicited calls: http://www.askcomreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/CG09RR.pdf. This should answer any queries you have. Information on the relevant legislation, SI 535 of 2003, is available on the Data Protection Commissioner’s website at www.dataprivacy.ie.

Additionally, if you request a particular company to remove your contact details from their marketing list, they are not supposed to contact you again. If they do and you wish to complain, you will need to contact the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

Still, if I am ex-directory, the only thing I can do is tell cold callers not to call again. Doesn’t make much sense to me - one would have thought being ex-directory is requesting an extra degree of privacy…

Interesting, RTE are reporting that I can soon stop the cold callers from annoying me every evening. Except for two things:

• My number is already ex-directory but not being in the directory means I can’t opt-out! Arrrgghh, how silly is that?????
• It only applies to calls made within the State. Offshore call centres are free to continue to annoy me.

For those of you considering quitting the day job to earn your crust blogging-non-stop Jason Calacanis, founder of WebLog’s Inc (a commercial venture that publishes many trade/vertical blogs) are projecting that they may collect collect over $1 million in revenue from Google AdSense click-thru’s this year.

That sounds like an interesting achievement until you consider they have “103 bloggers on the [sic]payrole and nine staffers here at WebLogs Inc”. To be fair, it’s not their only source of income, but still, $1m for a whole year for producing and publishing all that content? And they are one of the best known “blogging companies” in the world?

I like some parts of their philosophy but a statement like “traditional journalism is imploding” can only coming from someone who believe their own poo smells of roses. (Hey if you’re trying to sell yourself to one of the big media networks, you’ve got to hype the product up right?)

Traditional journalism will not implode - there is no substitute for a professional journalists analytical, filtering and writing skills to distil multiple sources of information into a concise and accurate story. (Most blogs I regularly read are written by folks who are good writers - unlike me

Traditional media channels on the other hand are a different story. Media companies will evolve to use new channels to get their content (and advertiser’s messages) to their customers - a retrospective comparison of the WWW of 1993 with the WWW today shows just how good big business is at catching up.

I think I’ll stick with my real job for the moment, and just do this for the fun of it…

(Oh, by ‘flogging’ I mean “to publicize aggressively” not “to beat severely with a whip or rod.”)

So they are finally going to have DTT trials in Ireland. I stumbled across a policy doc on RTE’s website. The depressing note about this policy is that it does not mention integrating with FreeView as a possibility. That said, both the URL and a reference in the document to “the propsed TV3″ probably mean that this policy document is no longer current

Does anyone know what RTE’s current policy on DTT is? I for one would be verry happy to dump my NTL subscription for a FreeView based box.

An interesting conversion going on between Don Box and Steve Vinoski, started by Don’s comments/questions related to Steve’s recent IEEE Internet Computing article. They are definately ‘talking across’ one another (as Don puts it) and I think the reason is Don hasn’t really grasped the purpose of the JBI spec. Don states:

I do have a hard time seeing how the Java developer community is served by yet another programming/management/deployment model for writing hosted code.

JBI does not serve, and was never intended to serve, the general Java developer community, nor is it designed to provide a programming/management/deployment model for writing hosted code - it is for writing hosting code. I’m wondering if Don has read the specfication correctly? (Update: it would seem he hasn’t) The Target Audience section of the spec, in the Introduction section of the spec makes this abundantly clear:

The primary audience for this specification is system level software engineers who will develop the following:

• implementations of the JBI infrastructure itself
• the components that provide communications protocol support,business logic, transformation engines, intelligent message routing etc.

This specification is not appropriate for application developers or business analysts. It is hoped that this specification will facilitate the development of standard service composition tools and services targeted specifically at this group.

On an slightly unrelated note, Steve comments in one of his blog entries:

My take is that containers aren’t as special as we’d like to think they are. A container really just supports a particular programming model or style.

I’m a little surprised at this comment - surely anything that enforces a particular programming model or style is an important consideration?!?!

I’m harping on here a but but the mis-information is still flowing so it should be countered. ICT Irelandhave posted a press release that can only be described as using the Chewbacca Defence. The press release opens with the following contradictory paragraph:

ICT Ireland was disappointed by today’s decision of the European Parliament to reject the Common Position on the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. We feel that the European Parliament has lost an opportunity to further Europe’s development as a knowledge economy. However, while the adoption of the Common Position would have been the ideal, no legislation is better than legislation that would have damaged Ireland’s competitiveness.

So let me get it straight then, they were disappointed that the EU didn’t introduce legislation that would have damaged Ireland’s competitiveness. Right then.

The release then states

However, there were several unhelpful amendments proposed to the Common Position, which sought to alter patent law as it currently stands, and we do welcome the decision of the MEPs to reject these amendments.

Unhelpful to whom? The 21 cross-party amendments were gaining support because they clarified several vague definitions in the original CIID. However, as Hartmut Pilch, president of the FFII states:

In recent days, the big holders of EPO-granted software patents and their MEPs, who had previously been campaigning for the Council’s “Common Position”, joined the call for rejection of the directive because it became clear that the 21 cross-party amendments championed by Roithova, Buzek, Rocard, Duff and others were very likely to be adopted by the Parliament. It was well noticeable that support for all most of these amendments was becoming the mainstream opinion in all political groups. Yet there would not have been much of a point in such a vote. We rather agree to the assessment of the situation as given by Othmar Karas MEP in the Plenary yesterday: a No was the only logical answer to the unconstructive attitude and legally questionable maneuvers of the Commission and Council, by which this so-called Common Position had come about in the first place.

Ah, so it wasn’t going their way so they preferred maintain the status quo than shoot themselves in the foot by recommending a Yes vote.

Lastly the ICT statement says

Patents provide incentives for companies to undertake R&D - no company, large or small, will invest heavily in research and innovation unless they know that they can protect the results.

Ah, denial, denial, denial. The grovelling to the Irish MEPs is only slightly less dignified.