Submitted by greggles on
I'm a big proponent of the Fair Trade movement. It's a market solution to a problem that legislators haven't done anything on except for Berkely where they tried (and failed) to pass something. Regulation would be too rigid and cumbersome - this is a problem that needs a market solution.
Submitted by greggles on
In his English language blog, Martin Varsavsky mentions that "In the last 24 hours alone we placed 800 access points." and also discusses how they have 100,000 registered Foneros and placed an order for 100k Foneras that they expect to use up by February of next year. That's all pretty impressive stuff. Or is it?
A little while ago there was a post that caused some serious uproar and division in the FON community basically bringing to a head what has already been happening: Fonero dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, rather than respond to the claims that their UI mislead users, FON simply disabled the ability to get the statistics that had been used to determine the actual growth rate of FON access points. So, now when Martin says in his blog "we are huge and growing insanely quickly!" what evidence do we have of that growth?
Additionally, and this is where having a Spanish literate wife comes in handy, in the
last
24 hours Martin has offered FREE Foneras to three different user communities - Meneama, Bandaanchast, and people who have commented in his Blog. The pessimistic view of this is a very bad one!
This was all a calculated scheme. Martin specifically gave the free FON devices to these communities so that he could artificially increase the number of units "placed" in the last 24 hours. Notice the use of the word "placed" as opposed to "sold". That's kind of sketchy behavior, but I think the even worse situation is this: people who get a router for free are not committed to the project. So, of the 800 "placed" in the last 24 hours what percent will actually get turned on? What percent of the group that get turned on will still be in use 24 hours after they are turned on? How about 24 weeks down the road? PLUS - I've already commented on the folly of this idea in Martin's first discussion of the point. The quality of the network is hugely important, so you don't want to have to send people around to test the points and there are plenty of sites that will teach you how to "crack" the router so it pretends to be working even though it's just serving up private WiFi. Free Foneras degrade the quality of the network. Bad idea. So, it's both shady accounting and it was done in a way that yields very little long term value for FON.
Submitted by greggles on
Images are fun. A little while ago Mozilla told the Debian folks that if Debian wanted to keep shipping the browser as "Firefox" and use the Firefox art then they have to follow the rules for using the Firefox name and art. These are in place to protect the Mozilla brand and security - e.g. you can't recompile Firefox with a cookie/traffic snooper and still call it Firefox.
Several Debian folks got upset about this because it didn't feel Free enough to them. Interestingly, Debian has a very similar policy about the use of their artwork:
- This logo may only be used if:
- the product it is used for is made using a documented procedure as published on www.debian.org (for example official CD-creation)
- official approval is given by Debian for its use in this purpose
- May be used if an official part of debian (decided using the rules in I) is part of the complete product, if it is made clear that only this part is officially approved
- We reserve the right to revoke a license for a product
This morning I was reading stuff from planet mozilla which pointed me to the below photo (original source).
Well, this was frustrating to me. So, I decided to grab a little Debian artwork and have some fun in Inkscape.
And just so that I'm not another log on the fire - it would be nice if some folks (e.g. Mitchell Baker and Anthony Towns) to say "Enough is enough, we're both great and well respected Open Source projects that have to protect our respective trademarks and we will honor the each other's trademark terms - no hypocritical criticism necessary".
Submitted by greggles on
There are several new companies coming out of the woodwork to help smaller publishers make money from their blog or blogs. I see this as just another step on the path from traditional media to distributed citizen media. It's also a great development in terms of enabling individuals to take control of their financial destiny.
Newspapers, radio shows, and other traditional media have always written favorable articles about advertisers. That is, after all, a big part of the motivation for Consumer Reports - to provide unbiased reviews of products. There are also several watchdog agencies that are pointing out the commercial bias in traditional media as Andy Hagans points out in the ReviewMe Blog. So, this is just a further step in an existing trend. And, as a further step, it's not surprising that a lot of the same contentious issues play out.
If you send a free gadget to a reviewer is that a "pay per review" situation? Martin Varsavsky debates this point but in his case he's lucky to just have a $5 product! But, when jounalists given over $500 worth of multimedia/cell phone kit, can you really expect them to be totally unbiased in writing about Nokia? Some people are bashing this new wave of "paid blogging" as biasing the blogosphere, but it's not as cut/clear of an issue as some
At the same time we've all heard the statistics about people ignoring advertising more and more - so marketers are a bit concerned about how to keep getting their ideas passed along in meme sex.
Submitted by greggles on
I've written in the past about finding high quality Drupal modules and the advice that I gave there is still mostly valid. And if you want to improve the quality of data about Drupal modules you should consider Improving Drupal without any work.
Today I revisited a topic that Killes introduced (at least to me) in his post about seeing results of code checker on Drupal modules. This can provide yet another data point about the quality of a drupal module.
The Code Checker itself is a php script which lives in CVS. It takes a pass at the code and runs some basic checks. It's validation of SQL queries only works if the queries fit onto one line, it expects SQL keywords (like SELECT and UPDATE to be uppercase). It has problems, but, it is also better than nothing! And, if you see a way to improve it you can edit the file and provide a patch (or patch it yourself if you have CVS access).
The check is run after a commit to CVS during the next run of the packaging script (which happens 3 times a day every 8 hours, 1AM, 9AM, and 17 GMT).
In the scripts/ directory of every Drupal download is a file code-style.pl. This code style check is another validation that is probably not perfect and which is not run in an automated fasion, but it does provide valuable information about the quality of code. Usage examples include:
$ ./code-style.pl ../path/to/myfile.module
$ ./code-style.pl ../modules/path.module
You'll need a perl environment to run the script, but even on Windows that's easy to get with Cygwin.
Submitted by greggles on
I want a personal injury lawyer for spam. For a variety of reasons I have to keep various email addresses that I use public. Some of these are used for work related to my neighborhood in Denver. We consistently get spam on those addresses from all sorts of places, and yeah, I want to sue those folks. But that's pretty hard. They hide and do all sorts of shady stuff that would prevent finding them.
Submitted by greggles on
So, this morning I found Rikki Tikki Tavi's Garden a reference to the childrens book where a mongoose defeats an evil pair of snakes. The name is well chosen: this user is attempting to defang a group of employees from the Center for American Progress, one of whom uses a snake username on some social bookmarking sites. And it is the involvment in the social bookmarking that is pissing off this particular mongoose.
He (or she...) doesn't have comments enabled on that blog, which pissed me off, so I wrote a lot more than I probably should have on the subject.
People who like a story will bookmark and "vote up" that story. You may not agree with them, but that's how it works.
Digg has an uneasy relationship with self-promotion that comes from the community. The Digg FAQ doesn't say how to handle it so instead we get community opinion on the matter. And therefore we get dissent from that opinion. That's how the real world works - deal with it.
Reddit saw that problem with Digg and set the ground rules off the bat. Right in the Reddiquette it says:
Post links directly to interesting things. Old content and self-promotion are okay, because Reddit is a meritocracy.
So let me repeat: People who like a story will bookmark and "vote up" that story. This is not a case of people being shills. It's reality.
Much as I hate to see it, the reality is that American law currently allows an organization to be a nonprofit think tank (gaining all sorts of tax and social benefits) but only if they are "non partisan". The IRS test for "non partisan" has to do with advocating for a specific politician. Most people just assume it's the appearance of a bias, which is not true. However, both the popularly accepted idea of "non partisan" as being "unbiased" and the IRS test of "not advocating for a person" are crossed every day!
