gorog

Well, Google real customers are advertisers. They sure need to welcome their customers in their network.

I'm happy with Netvibes. It has a widget view like iGoogle and a Reader view like Google Reader. I find the latter to be better now. It integrates with Facebook and Twitter, if it's the kind of social stuff you want. It won't push what others like to you, however. That's what Twitter is for.

> Assuming they lose in court

They sure can't win in court as they're not informed that they're being judged before the judgment is passed. There is no possible defense.

> on something as difficult to prove as "neglecting to secure your internet access"

If the Hadopi said they caught your IP, the evidence is given. They don't have to prove you neglected to secure your access, it's you who shall prove you didn't neglect it by installing a government-approved spyware on your Windows-only PC.

Personally, at the first warning I will get a VPN. The defense is simple.

* Lack of sunlight

As far as I know, Eurozone businesses and individuals can have their bank account anywhere in the Eurozone. Paypal and Stripe may only have offices in Luxembourg to serve all EUR countries. That's the upside of a unified market. The UK and other non-EUR countries have renounced to it.

They just replaced the pretty but useless wallpaper on the desktop by a full-screen version of the start menu. Start typing 'wo' and you get the link to Microsoft Word (and WoW, and your 'wonderful.jpg' file, etc), just like in the old start menu.

The main 'revolution' in this Metro UI is that it's a tiling window manager, one that was made user-friendly with gestures to manage tiles. It leaves the WIMP desktop metaphor to an easily accessible legacy mode (and MacOS). Tiling WM are not especially keyboard-unfriendly, nor reserved to small screens.

Personally, I think Microsoft is moving in the right direction.

Windows Azure seems pretty cool. At least it has the best relational database of the big three clouds, and the best blobstore+CDN solution. However, it makes IIS mandatory, which seems (I'm still learning) to be optimized for short queries. iisnode should make long-polling and websockets possible.

I have a 17'' (1920*1080) laptop at home and a 27'' iMac at work.

For displaying the likes of Netbeans, both are comfortable. I don't display the browser in full screen on the iMac because it's ridiculously large. For watching videos however, the 27'' are impressive. I would say programmers don't need huge screens nor multiple ones but I suppose it depends on one's preferences and habits.

I don't think the critics of the NYT where out of touch with reality. The big 3 French newspaper (lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr, liberation.fr) are all much easier to scan than the likes of the NYT.

I would include a pattern matching line:

$date = "2011-07-29";

$list($year, $month, $day) = explode("-", $date);

With whatever is cooler than a date, or with the company's creation date.

My bank only allows passwords to be made of 5 numbers.

The interesting thing to note is that if they had any significant problem with this scheme, they would have changed it. Maybe we worry too much about the strength of passwords. The password verification process may be hardened enough, even for the needs of a bank.

This past year I followed a web development course. I'm now supposed to work 3 months for free. I don't mind it because I've been jobless for a long time before. The problem is, I just can't find an employer (in France). I get the interviews, but my interviewer always assumes that I'm supposed to know everything by heart, have nothing more to learn, and more importantly, they want to see a portfolio of sites I've done before other than the one I've done in class. Basically, they don't want an intern, they want a real, super-fast worker for free. So I'm going to fail at my diploma because nobody wants me to work for free for them. To make it worse, I'm the best student of my class. Those who can't code found an internship. Are we supposed to lie and bluff to be allowed to be exploited?

VPN will become the norm. Internet access will be 30€ for the ISP + 5 € for the VPN. Not that much of a big deal for the citizen, more worrying for Paris as a tech scene.

Oh please people stop using this top bar that appears after we scrolled, it's today's version of blinking flash banners.

No, they're centralized like Twitter. StatusNet is like the Wordpress of microblogging. Each Wordpress installation is its own isolated island. It's the same with StatusNet.

Plus Nokia certainly negotiated a great deal. If they get WP7 licenses for 1$ when others get it for 10$, they have room to provide better quality for the same retail price, while making comfortable margins. It's not because Apple develops its own OS that this strategy is the best for everyone. Nokia should better be the next Dell than the next Amiga. Also, carriers can't break WP7 like they can break Android (and block its updates).

It's hard to find a great company name.

There are some WTF names like Apple Computers, or obscure acronyms like IBM. Specifically English words like MySpace are great for English-speaking customers, not so much for others. Invented proper names like Google should better be short and the Google example has the downsides of an English word since it sounds way more English than Japanese. 'Great' depends on context of course.

I would say Twitter is great because they use the metaphor consistently (tweets, the bird icon, the egg avatar).

For my own project, I will take the least bad name whose domain I can buy. People will get used to it eventually.

We already have wavelet codecs like Dirac, which are quite exotic compared to MPEG4 / VP8 / Theora.

Wait, China allowed Skype? Where has their protectionism gone?

Riak is distributed (it automatically shards data on many servers). CouchDB runs on a single server, although it can easily have as many mirrors as needed.

Also, Riak features an integrated full-text search engine.

And leave the Web as a set of static pages like in the nineties? Web applications are desirable, if only because they're multi-platform. Javascript is what saved us from those slow and not so safe Java applets (and Flash, Silverlight, which would be everywhere without Ajax).

Anyway, malwares would have spread through downloaded executables (e-mail attachments, etc). Is Javascript even helpful to most malwares?

Yandex has its own index and shows good results in English (but no photo/video search). Exalead has its own index too but it lacks a good junk filter à la PageRank.

It relies on Google Voice which is not available in France anyway.

A little while ago, Twitter only stored our last 20 tweets and discarded the previous ones. When they stopped being that much ephemeral, no one noticed.

They won't ditch the euro, it's what saved them. The drachme would have worthed nothing if it were still Greece's currency. The healthier EU countries created a fund in order to save their own currency, the euro, and had to save Greece in the process. The common currency has created a necessary solidarity between the states.

Definitely. Those who write for the web don't need TeX. Those who write for print must not do the job of their editor. Manuscript standards are technically minimalist. They must look like they were written on a typewriter. LaTeX is for self-published authors and scientific papers (only because TeX was the first solution with a decent way to write equations).

Uh, as a reply to myself, I think I confused an IPO with a tender offer.

They're just relocating/centralizing their headquarters in Luxembourg. The IPO is from their Luxembourg office on their US office. Not a big deal.

http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow I remember this resembles Wave, minus the wiki thing. It's not free, however.

It's exactly the feature I desperately wanted a few months ago, but then I modified the UI so that it loads a page for each piece of information that's important enough to have it's own URL and the result was considerably simpler to use. This feature will make it very easy to write overly complicated interfaces. Designers will have to be careful.