Posts by skyroski

Drupal 7 dives into machine-readable web

Web scraping

It makes it easier for what a lot of web devs, owners and operators don't want - web scraping.

Of course it might make search engines better at categorising but, realistically, I agree with some post above. It's not for everyone.

Google plugins force-feed open codec to IE and Safari

Good

Google WebM is a much needed presence in the market of video codecs that offsets the alliance of the MPEG LA.

'Technical Performance' debates aside, factoring in the risk of royalities from MPEG LA should ring alarm bells on everybody that are not part of the MPEG LA.

The plugins for Safari and IE are to me are more symbolic than of real use. The two browsers are going downhill anyway.

So what if they're hyopcrites? Aren't we all? I for one cannot care less what they're branded, all I know is they're doing something good.

re: Hardware Decode support, look it up, it's in the pipeline. Don't forget WebM only came to being middle of last year.

Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark

Before you take sides, you ought to know...

You're not supposed to trademark descriptive words, and it's not a US only thing either.

Personally, I don't like either of them, but for once I hope MS succeeds in stopping the new MS of the late 2000.

PHP apps plagued by Mark of the Beast bug

interesting, but the use case shouldn't really ever be used.

This is a bad bug but I believe PHP has always maintained if you're dealing with large precision numbers you should always treat the number as a string. Which as the originator's blog pointed out it seems to work.

and then use the precision maths libaries to handle such numbers as the internal maths ops are not built to handle precision numbers and has rounding errors. I wonder if anyone tried with the the libs and whether it still crash the system.

If it doesn't then I believe it's a case of bad programming as well.

Apple patent endangers unbiased product reviews

nothing more than an idea, and clarity required on 'computer method'

If it's not been said yet. Why should ideas be granted patents? That filing is nothing more than an idea.

A computer 'method' which is the term used in the filing is nothing more than an action. Can I patent moving arms back and forth?!?! Or patent the shopping process?!? If I can patent the shopping process can I patent the process 'getting on the bus'?

Software patents are non-sensical. Since the software 'world' can be said to essentially be another dimension of the physical world we exist.

While I understand large companies have to protect their interest from patent trolls. I'd expect someone like Steve Jobs to fight it by actually correcting the patent system. Not abusing it.

WikiLeaks dubs Amazon 'The Cowardly Liar'

Back on topic

I use Amazon EC2, I thought they were great, unfortunately I found their TOS too dictactor like and actually forbids the most common things.

Like: Posting messages of offensive nature. You technically can get booted off for having a forum with flame posts in them apparently.

I will be switching all my services to real hosts, but it was suprisingly hard to find as most web host's TOS (even on dedicated or colocated servers) basically gives them the power to boot anyone off even if the content has not been proven to break any laws.

We need a new mega hosting corporation that advocates true freedom.