Benox's Journey to Eninnet: The Play Day, Ice Skating, A Hot Day, and...Memories Of A Good Dog

Benox's Journey to Eninnet: The Play Day, Ice Skating, A Hot Day, and...Memories Of A Good Dog

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Creating Printable Documents with Ruby

Creating Printable Documents with Ruby

After-thanksgiving Rail components

After-thanksgiving Rail components

The Default WebBrick - Ruby on Rails

The Default WebBrick - Ruby on Rails

The definitive Ruby book - unforuntately missing some figures - buy the new book

The definitive Ruby book - unforuntately missing some figures - buy the new book

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KickApps test

This is the 1st test of WWW:Mecahnize post

Do not have much to say this time

Microsoft - harbinger of true New Internet?

Today, LEE GOMES of WSJ wrote an piece on MS's recent live.com and live office iniative, indicating that it's may a play of parlay or hedge play.


Is Microsoft getting into the business of the New Internet just when the business is going south? If it is, this is one case where the company isn't going to mind if its timing is off.
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If it all seems like the usual case of Microsoft belatedly catching up with others' innovations and market pressure, that's partly true. The company is trying to diffuse the well-publicized threat posed to it by Google. But there is more to it than that. Microsoft is also grappling with a phenomenon that is related but less well-known, at least outside of Silicon Valley: The belief in certain tech circles that the Internet is in the midst of a revolutionary shift.

Those pushing the idea of a New Internet, sometimes known as Web 2.0, say this new, improved Net won't just be about Web pages, but also, among other things, about introducing a new breed of agile and personalized programs that live on the network instead of on your PC.


Microsoft will be ready in either event; that was the whole point of last week's event. For instance, the company spent a lot of time talking about online advertising revenue; you'd have thought it was a weekly shopper for all the ads it's going to start showing folks. Many of the new Live offerings will have a free version that is supported through advertising. If you want to live without the ads, then you've got to pay.
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Most people expect Google, among others, to try to steadily chip away at Office with alternative, probably free, programs like Gmail. Microsoft didn't even come close last week to offering online (much less free) versions of Word or Excel. But by talking about new bits of Web software for Office -- if only for small businesses -- it put the issue of the future of Office on the table, and by implication acknowledged that it would take even more radical steps if it had to.

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But whether Microsoft ever needs to do all this depends on how much the New Web is a real thing, or just the wishful thinking of technology insiders who read each others' blogs and yearn for the excitement of the dot-com glory days.

Already, there is a something of an anti-Web 2.0 backlash brewing: not in the real world, of course, since people there haven't heard of it in the first place, but among some of the digerati, who fret that tech types may be getting a little carried away with their new toys.
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Anyone who has used one of the new email programs from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can appreciate how online programs now feel almost as fast and powerful as those on your desktop. It's an exciting time to be on the Internet, or writing programs for it. But is it a revolution, rearranging the wealth of the tech world?

To find the answer, watch Microsoft. The 900-pound gorilla is now the canary in the coal mine of the New Internet.

Writely.com as a processor node in the cross-interactive web universe

Recently, I made the following suggestion to Writely.com, though I'm not sure if they like it or if it's doable:
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With your system, a user can upload their files or can email-in files, all very good! But, can you do more, in the essence of Web 2.0:

1) How about let a use to enter an URL (e.g. http://www.vanguard.edu/emplibrary/files/psychapa.doc) to load an online file into Writely.com.
2) Or even further more, after the user finishes processing the file, let him/her publish the files to a web server (http://www.receive.com/post or any RESTful sites or FTP server) that can accept post with proper credential (e.g. uname/pwd, or md5 stuff). BTW, if you have some ideas about creating some standard and portable server-let that web-operator can easily install on their web servers (of course, for the purpose of POST only), that'd be even better (or another way would be that you set some API standard and others can implment it).

Why you want to do it?

You want to do it because people may want to keep the file in their own web sites (not their local machine, that would be against web platform mantra) because they think their websites are their homes, well, in the web ether, anyway. They want to use your services to do all the word processing, collaboration and other cool processing stuff you guys do. But at the end of the day, they want to get a copy back to their own websever node and do whatever cool stuff they feel like to do afterwards in their own sites (maybe offer something back just as useful as yours).

I know some solo or small law attorneys (who, by the way, mostly have their own websites already) or even professionals on the go a lot may like the idea.
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koOOTao on Flows of Minds

koOTao on Flows of Minds

Today: Everything from Smith's invisible hand to Schelling's game theory to 'Good Samaritan' Paradox to Irish tax heaven for Google

I read this today.....

The rule of thumb, economies thinks, works best when markets decide the price of a good. Market forces, economists argue, create a comfortable balance between supply and demand.

Make the price too low, and the people supplying a product or service might stop producing it, fearing they won't make a decent profit.

Make the price too high, and you'll choke off demand. When supply and demand determine the price, the thinking goes, a balance is reached.

It is one of the underpinnings to Adam Smith's invisible hand theory, which held that the selfish acts of individuals led to greater good for society.

'Good Samaritan' Paradox

Economists have wrestled for years with how to address the economic consequences of natural disasters. Gary Becker, the Nobel prize-winning University of Chicago economist, says policy makers need to consider something he calls the "Good Samaritan" paradox. Just about everybody's inclination after disaster strikes is to help the victims. "It is hard for a country to sit by and watch people in miserable circumstances as a result of a disaster," he says. "It is not desirable."

However the help, and the promise of rebuilding, also gives people an incentive to keep living in disaster-prone places. Like Mr. Glaeser, he's for helping victims. But to limit the perverse incentives, Mr. Becker says any rebuilding of the place should come with tough love from the government, such as tight zoning restrictions in flood-prone areas and tough flood insurance rules.

Questions:

How have the rules of the game of nuclear deterrence changed now that the players are countries like Iran and North Korea, instead of the Soviet Union a generation ago?

A: I think if Iran or North Korea gets nuclear weapons, they will think of them as deterrent weapons. They won't want to get into any kind of nuclear war. They won't want to use those weapons. They will want to use them to keep Russia or the U.S. from intervening militarily, and we will learn what it is like being deterred not by a highly qualified adversary, but by a couple of small inimical countries. We may have to get used to that.

Q: There's also this concern that North Korea or Iran could become involved in illicit trade in nuclear weapons?
Prof. Schelling: I have a hunch that if there ever appeared to be a black market in fissile material or in actual bombs, that the U.S. would have the good sense and the cleverness and the ability to enter the black market and engage in what we used to call preclusive purchases. During World War II there were a lot of natural resources, mostly minerals, that the Germans badly needed, and the U.S. had a program of buying up those materials, not because we wanted them but because we wanted to keep them out of the hands of the Germans. I would think that we would be able to outbid anybody that wanted to buy a nuclear weapon. If North Korea thinks it can sell a nuclear weapon for $1 billion, we ought to be in there offering $5 billion so nobody could top that bid.


Q: That sounds like a slippery slope. How is the Bush administration doing managing the changing nuclear threat?


A: It's perfectly clear that it's had no success in Iran, and it's had no success in North Korea. Whether that's because it's doing it badly or because it's an impossible task, I don't know. I tend to think that it is not being very pragmatic about North Korea. We really ought to give North Korea some kind of nonaggression assurance... We should volunteer it, on grounds that the primary motivation for North Korea to get a nuclear weapon is to make sure the U.S. can never attack. If they were to take seriously a nonaggression treaty, they might feel less need to have a nuclear weapon.

Q: Doesn't that just invite other players into the game?
A: I don't think so. Who? Brazil? Argentina? Bangladesh? Who wants to get into the game? It is not a good game to get into.


Irish Subsidiary Lets Microsoft and Google, and Dell and.... Slash Taxes in U.S. and Europe -

A vision of true individual data and entity freedom - the manifesto

The new vision I'm proposing here is not just another data infrastructure, it is part of a movement (Web 2.0 or not) of transforming the online world from today’s hardwired and interlocked model* to a new paradigm in which each individual** truely owns his/her data and can choose how, to whom, and with what to interact with the rest of online-world (mind you, and the desktop world) in anywhere and at any time

It's also about enabling the world to take advantage (in a good and willingly way) of services each individual may offer from their own center of universe. This would call for the existence of data model that can represent each individual's ipseity and a new online data-application model in which applications will be created with a base anticipation that they will depend on data or services from other web entities. You can look at this as if we are proposing to apply the MVC pattern to the whole web ecosystem. This is happening in some limited way already, looking at all kinds of Google map mashups applications, for example.

This new framework is one of major and inevitable directions the web is moving towards because that’s where ultimate data and application democracy lie and it’s where the ultimate virtuality – an infrastructure independent of specific physical infrastructure – can truly realize. I argue this is so because individuals want to be free; data wants freedom, and data wants to be used and to interact! The force for data-democracy and virtuality*** can only continue because the current computing model is still too unnatural to the human nature. The new vision is a small but profound step to lead the promsing land.

* Today, individuals do not their own data, identity, operability – because the data, identity, and desired operations are all locked in other web applications they don’t and can’t own due to the interlocking of the personal data and apps in each and every website the user engage with

** Individuals include the ones that want to have their web presence and control their own data, but want to be unencumbered by the current physical architecture and process, such as having to set up own domain and websites etc.

*** The virtuality is not about just about the web as a platform. Desktop still plays its role, but it just doesn't matter where the desktop or end-user device resides - the user's preferences and data can come from the web, from the memory key, and from local desktops.

Which blogger to use?

It's confusing, well, some may say exciting, to see so many blog software and so many blog hosting services out there. Don't know which to choose, and don't want to bother to read pundit's comparison, I decided to try them all out myself. This is my first try. Wish me a rich learning experience.