Disqus - Latest Comments for jbond

Re: Let The World Change You (Scripting News)

dave — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:15:52 -0000

Ahhhh right -- that's where I've heard this before.

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

Re: Let The World Change You (Scripting News)

jbond — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:53:52 -0000

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Re: iPhone and Windows 7 Don’t Play Nice, No Fix in Sight

jbond — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:32:08 -0000

Or waited till Apple got their act together

Re: iPhone and Windows 7 Don’t Play Nice, No Fix in Sight

jbond — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:36:31 -0000

Simple answer. Don't use iTunes. That's ok for music, except what else is there for things like Calendar?

Re: Google Maps Navigation Becomes Reality on the Android

jbond — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:37:24 -0000

"Google Maps Navigation is initially available in the United States."

Sigh. Yet another Geo-location based App that isn't global from day one.

Re: John McCain Wants to Block FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules

jbond — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:54:14 -0000

Speaking as a European, that's a load of old bollocks. The problem you can't seem to get is that this is not an issue of ideology. It's not about free market vs government controlled markets. It's about how a society deals with a very small number of very large corporations controlling an infrastructure that has a bottle neck right next to the customer that limits the last mile to a single supplier. It doesn't matter if it's water, electricity, telephones, cable TV or internet access, you can't have a properly free market if there's only one connection at the house. And even in apparently open and free markets, capitalism has many, many examples of monopolies abusing their position and requiring government interference *for the greater good of society*. So get off that soap box about the superiority of the US vs the European, Canadian (or South American or Asian) political systems. And try and look dispassionately at what works and what doesn't.

Competition between providers is a good thing. Real competition between ISPs makes Net Neutrality a non-issue. As long as one ISP provides a Neutral service the customers who want that will move to them. But what you have right now is not competition, it's a monopoly or series of monopolies. And monopolies need government interference to break them up. Leaving the monopoly in place but trying to legislate the behaviour of the monopoly won't work in the long term. And as much as anything that's because very large, monopolist corporations are much better at lobbying governments than you or me.

Re: John McCain Wants to Block FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules

jbond — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:51:36 -0000

<rant>Sadly the USA and Canada run a Pigopoly. That is a system where many markets are government controlled and form a government mandated monopoly or duopoly or (tripoli?), not a free market. And one where the corporations get to lobby the government harder than the customers. So it shouldn't surprise anyone when ideas like Net Neutrality get decided in favour of the corporations. If it was actually a free market with real competition, customers would punish lack of net neutrality by moving supplier. Where this gets tricky is with infrastructure services that are inevitably limited to a single source of supply at the customer's end. Roads, Trains, Water, Gas, Sewage, Electricity, Landlines, Mobile phone access and now internet access. It's pretty hard to require true competition so inevitably markets tend towards monopolies and inevitably government has to step in and create artificial competition. IMHO the argument in this area should not be about what individual ISPs can or can't do and hence whether Net Neutrality is a good or bad thing and should be required. The argument should be about how to create a more competitive, "free-er", artificial market with less ability for the corporations or cartels of corporations to influence the rules of the game. ISTM that the USA is neither capitalist nor communist, neither left wing nor right wing but Pigopolist. Government for the Government-Military-Corporate Complex, by the Complex and of the Complex. And the People be damned. And actually although the USA is an extreme example, most of the "Free West" runs like this.</rant>

Some countries have experimented with creating artificial competition in closed limited markets. The most obvious one being the UK. The UK has separated supply from delivery in electricity, gas and internet access and in the last case requires one of the two last-mile delivery companies[1] to sell bandwidth wholesale at a fixed price and to provide access to the last mile cable in deistribution points to 3rd parties. The jury's out on whether it all actually works, but there is fairly healthy competition between multiple ISPs with sizable market share. Enough for them to stick two fingers up to the governments attempts to bring 3 strike laws on copyright abuse. In theory, net neutrality should not be an issue in such a system because customers can fairly easily move away from an ISP that abuses it. Somewhat bizarrely, any suggestion that the US should follow suit is shot down in flames for being anti-free market. Which takes me back to Pigopolies again.

[1]BT is required to provide LLU and wholesale bandwidth. Why isn't Virgin cable required to do the same thing?

Re: Rdio: Skype’s Founders Eye Another Hit in Online Music

jbond — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:17:56 -0000

Hmmm. JoltID, a history in Kazaa[1]. Could this be a P2P version of Seeqpod where you can stream any MP3 in any participant's music collection rather than just those on the web? Combine that with a Last.fm style analytics program and social network and this thing might have legs. Now can they work out how to make it properly P2P and completely outside the global licensing regimes?

[1]Oh. Wait. Monetised through malware.

Re: Rdio: Skype’s Founders Eye Another Hit in Online Music

jbond — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:04:51 -0000

You mention Spotify and Pandora but not Last.Fm which despite it's faults is still the most complete service in this area. And the one that beat Pandora in your own poll.

Re: LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users

jbond — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:06:53 -0000

50 million headhunters in the world. Who knew?

Re: EU and Microsoft Near Browser Agreement

jbond — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:42:15 -0000

hmmm. EU, Apple and Safari?

Re: HOW TO: Integrate Facebook With Your Blog

jbond — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:35:59 -0000

I do wonder about moderation with these systems. Some of them make the problem of spam easier to cope as they have their own spam filters. While others could end up creating a lot of extra work. And moderation is also necessary where there's some stalking going on given how easy it is to create temporary phantom accounts on the other system.

Re: TWITTER LOCAL: 5 Twitter Geolocation Features We Want

jbond — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:30:41 -0000

and #1; Please, please make the main service and all related apps work globally from day one, and not just on the west coast.

Re: Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter

marram — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:16:41 -0000

Have you seen http://www.thesponty.com ?

Re: Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter

twitter-6532 — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:31:06 -0000

You're clearly not paying attention. There is a web version, it's not tied to iPhone, and they are beginning to support international cities.

Re: Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter

jbond — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:59:15 -0000

- No web version. Check
- Tied to iPhone, Bllackberry coming. Check.
- Handful of US cities and not inherently international. Check.
FAIL!

When will somebody do for "where are you?", what Twitter did for "What are you doing?" It's about time isn't it?

Re: Apple Needs to Fix the iPhone App Store’s Race to the Bottom

jbond — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:27:59 -0000

The Apple App store is a classic Apple walled garden. If it had been done in a web 2 style we could be crowdsourcing, mashing, investigating and mixing it up ourselves.

But then that's not the Apple way, right?

Re: This is not an earth-shaking announcement (Scripting News)

jbond — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:52:20 -0000

All these years and I never knew you were into M/C racing. Respect.

Re: Facebook Lets You Open Your Profile to Everyone

jbond — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:52:11 -0000

Please note: "Everyone" actually means "Everyone logged into Facebook". On the rest of the web, like Twitter and so on, Everyone would actually mean Everyone.

Re: 5 Great Instant Messenger Aggregators Across Multiple Platforms

jbond — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:31:13 -0000

Conspicuous by its (almost complete) absence. Skype. It's really the only IM I still use.

Re: 2009/01/06/augmented-reality-devices/

Julian Bond — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:44:59 -0000

Where are my Oakley HUD sunglasses?

I seem to have been waiting nearly 20 years now for an affordable, stylish, HUD display. I can't help also thinking that there are some basic protocols needed to go with this.

Re: Turning Twitter into my friend-feed (Scripting News)

jbond — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:25:17 -0000

Interesting. It would be possible to do an RSS reader that reduced every feed in an opml list to a title link and 140 chars of body text. Or as in this case, a link + 140 chars of title+body. This would probably make it easier to fast scan a large river of news from more sources. Thinking more, this is just a UI tweak. You could have alternate displays of 1) Just the title, 2) 140 character title +body, 3) title plus full body with successive clicks. Perhaps with an outliner approach as you use on your main blog display. In fact this might work well in that situation as well.

Of course feeding this into a dummy Twitter account means other people can easily subscribe to your news river but I think the UI option is worth exploring in its own right.

Re: 2009/01/01/is-it-stupid-to-trust-twitter-apps-with-your-password/

Julian Bond — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:41:33 -0000

OpenID doesn't help here. What is needed is oAuth and more especially oAuth libs.
And of course widespread implementation. And for that to happen, the oAuth standard probably needs to be simplified and finished.

Now just perhaps Twitter's API success along with stories like this will actually help by bringing this problem to people's attention.

Re: The lame duck ducks (Scripting News)

dave — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:55:26 -0000

Physical attacks on people are never cool. Carry a sign, stand up and scream, whatever. As soon as physical violence is part of a protest then I've got a problem. Weren't people just last week saying how bad it was when the Weather Undgerground blew up an empty office in the Pentagon? In this case the attack was against a human being, and at that, a very important human being, with huge symbolic value. I asked a bunch of questions about this on Twitter, I should probably have asked them here too. Will probably post shortly on this.

Re: The lame duck ducks (Scripting News)

jbond — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:47:34 -0000

"This is not cool" So what would be a legitimate (cool) form of protest? Perhaps if it had been a custard pie rather than shoes?