Category: Closed Course

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Yelling ‘Freebird!’ Exposed in WSJ

WSJ.com – Rock’s Oldest Joke: Yelling ‘Freebird!’ In a Crowded Theater
“Yelling “Freebird!” has been a rock cliché for years, guaranteed to elicit laughs from drunks and scorn from music fans who have long since tired of the joke. And it has spread beyond music, prompting the Chicago White Sox organist to add the song to her repertoire and inspiring a greeting card in which a drunk holding a lighter hollers “Freebird!” at wedding musicians.“

Freebird is fine, but I’ve always preferred yelling “Zepellin” myself:)

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Copyright Office Adds RSS Feeds

Library Stuff
“The U.S. Government has a long way to go with implementing RSS into their content delivery systems, but this is a step in the right direction. It looks like the Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress, has launched 4 RSS Feeds.“

Well, its a step in the right direction. But each feed contains exactly one item and the links in 3 of the 4 items point to generic pages. I’ll beinterested in seeing if they actually followup with anything useful.

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OSS Projects Offer Bounties: Code for Rewards

Slashdot | OSS Projects Offer Bounties For Features
“The market for open source developers seems to be heating up. Asterisk, Gnome, Horde, and Mozilla all have bounties for desired features. Recently, Lime Wire updated its wish list to include bounties on open source development work! Similarly, i2p also released a bounty list. Is it time to consider quitting my day job to do open source development full time?“

CALI tried this to get some community particiaption on web services development, but the effort was less than a success with 1, 2, takers and not a lot of general enthusiasm. I was surprised that no .NET, ASP, ColdFusion, or Java folks stepped up and at least tried this out. Probably says more about the teknoids community than the notion of bounties.

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Verizon To Drop NYC Hotspots

Verizon decommissions wireless LAN hot spots in N.Y. – Computerworld
“Citing low usage levels, Verizon Communications Inc. plans to decommission the 380 free Wi-Fi hot spots in New York City that it had turned on for its DSL customers two years ago.

Fewer than half the hot spots were generating more than 80% of the traffic. “Usage didn’t live up to our expectations,” a Verizon spokeswoman said. “Customers didn’t take advantage of it.”“

I wonder if people really want o be online all the time anyway? I mean I certainly want access to information that is found on the net at any given moment, but I don’t want to be constantly followed around by email, IM, Skype, RSS, etc. I just want to know when the next boxing match is on TV or how much the doodad I just find at Goodwill is selling for on Ebay.

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First Podcast Driven Radio Station

Infinity Set To Debut First Podcasting Radio Station
“Beginning today, users will be able to upload podcasts of varying lengths for free at www.kyouradio.com where it will be eligible to be selected for broadcast. Programming on the station will be determined by listener interests and feedback, and evaluated on a daily basis.“

Picked this up via Scripting News. Sounds like a neat idea, but it could get a little scary:) The site mentioned right now is a little bare, but it does invite you to upload your podcasts. I couldn’t find any public information about copyright, royalties to podcasters, etc. so there is no way of telling what happens when you upload your stuff. The general terms of use of site are pretty standard, but I wonder, if I upload something, do I lose control of it? Am I signing over copyright? Do I get royalties? Should I just be happy that I’m geting ‘air time’? I’m sure a big opreation like Infinity has thought these things out. It would be nice to share.

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IEBlog Explains PNG Implementation in IE7

IEBlog : IE7 Transparent PNG Implementation
“My name is Sam Fortiner and I’m a developer on the Internet Explorer team here at Microsoft. I joined the company about a year ago when I was given the opportunity to work on IE. Since then I’ve worked on several aspects of IE and recently settled down into the layout and display team. As part of my work in this team, I implemented support for per-pixel alpha in PNGs.“

Aside from the fact this is avery good explanantion of what it took to get transparent PNG support into IE7, this post alos illustrates evrything that is good about corporate blogging. Indeed the entire IEBlog is a testament to how blogging can be used to connect with customers. We could all learn from this.

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Open Law Review ‘Bad’ List Removed

Open Access Law: Open Law Reviews
“The left column has changed. Details on why soon…“

Over at Open Access Law, Dan Hunter has removed the listing of ‘Good and Bad Law Reviews‘

Open Access Law with LR listing Open Access Law listing gone

I would wonder if it is just a layout issue as alluded to earlier,or if he is getting heat from some of the ‘Bad Law Reviews’? FWIW, I agree with Dan that Law reviews should be more open with access to their articles. I guess we’ll just wait and see.

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Where Have Portals Gone?

Portals Fostering Open-Source Success
“If you go to the open-source development site sourceforge.net and search on the term “portal,” you’ll get hundreds of hits. In fact, you could reasonably argue that, when it comes to open-source enterprise applications, portals have been the biggest success story.

In addition to being highly effective and capable on their own, open-source portals have served to demonstrate the effectiveness of other open-source technologies, especially the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language. This is clearly illustrated in probably the most popular open-source portal application, PHP-Nuke (www.phpnuke.org), which is easily customized and includes pretty much any feature you would want from a portal, including content and document management, forums, chat, and blogging. PHP-Nuke has spawned additional open-source portals, including PostNuke (www.postnuke.com).“

Looks like Open Source is the place to g oif you’re looking for portal software. Once a buzz word, portals have quietly become the norm for site development in many areas. I suspect aht blogs and such will follow a similar path.

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Rater of Change in Linux 2.6 Kerenl Sparks Debate

Kernel Changes Draw Concern from Open-Source Community
“Members of the open-source community are expressing concern over rapid feature changes in the Linux 2.6 kernel, which they say are too focused on the desktop and could make the kernel too large.“

The inclusion of features for gamers and music, as well as uncertainty about the future of virtualization in the kernel are causing concern for some of the large corporations feeding off of Linux. This will certainly get worse before it gets better. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see a fork in the code in the not to distant future with the BigCos taking on the development of an ‘enterprise’ kernel and the volunteer developers continuing on with a kernel for the rest of us.

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Open-Access Academic Journals: Where is Legal Academia?

Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
“Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.“

The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)