Yves's planet

• Submitted by: Steve Butler

<p>The /programmes team have been progressing well with further developments to the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes">/programmes</a> site and now have a useful set of feeds (XML, JSON, YAML and even some txt) - including ones for schedule views and genre aggregations, as well as some iCal views. There are still more features coming - so keep checking back to see what else has been added.</p> <p>For information on the feeds available, please visit the /programmes site <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/developers">developers page</a>.</p> <p> <br /> For more information it is worth reading Tom Scott's <a href="http://derivadow.com/2008/07/18/interesting-bbc-data-to-hack-with/">"Interesting BBC Data to Hack With"</a> post and Duncan Robertson's in-depth post about the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/07/some_ical_views_onto_programme.shtml">iCal views</a>.</p> <p>For people who have already found the Schedule feeds, it is worth noting that the structure of the existing schedules feeds will change soon (by the end of July if all goes to plan). This move is to a future-proofed and better structure, based on the feedback received. There is a hybrid format available to allow you to transition your apps to the new format - we will remove support for the old structure on 30th July.</p> <p>Feedback is welcomed through the backstage mailing list. <br /> <br /> Steve</p>

As a follow-up to my Applescript for sending all open PDFs to Papers, here's a script that sends the currently open PDF as an email attachment to a specified address, with a prefixed subject (so you can set up a mail filter to add a label once it arrives). This is particularly useful if you decide you want to have the current PDF available for reference in Gmail on your phone.

Ideally you'd be able to use Google's Documents API to upload the file directly to Google Docs, but the API doesn't have support for PDFs, yet.

→Download the script← (edit the sender and recipient as appropriate, then place in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Skim).

You can remove all the GrowlHelperApp-related lines if you don't want notification.

Read the full post...

xaositects writes "Now I know all of you have your 3D glasses from 1985 still, so don them once again to check out these cool 3D images of Mars's Arctic landscape from the Phoenix Lander's stereoscopic imager. There are also a few close-ups of the parts of Phoenix that are in view and a link to more pictures on the Phoenix Image Gallery."

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Technical background: The photos and titles are read from an XML file, and the thumbnails are pre-generated using Photoshop actions (included in the download).

Do you happen to have come by a large collection of MP3's, ordered in folders by album? Are they named something like "Artist Name - Album Name"? Would you like to download the cover for each album so you can browse them like this in explorer?

An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project (pdf) in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.The researchers neither sought legal review of the project or ran it past their Institutional Review Board. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has written a legal guide for Tor admins, strongly advises against any sort of network monitoring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Twitteriffic needs permission to know where I am; but MyStreets doesn't need permission to read and sort all of the contacts on my phone. And with VoiceRecord, I was never prompted for permission for the application to listen to my microphone."

Bobfrankly1 writes "The FBI, IRS, and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force are helping the US Marshals search for escaped 'Spam King' Edward 'Eddie' Davidson. He apparently jumped in a car with his Wife, changed clothes at home, and hasn't been seen since."

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SourceForge page for the OwlDiff project. A tool to perform a 2-way diff of OWL ontologies. Useful for version control of ontologies.

"Just drag a file to a folder and it flies off to a pre-determined email address."

"Now the the Core Google Docs project supports PDF uploads through the web client, support of PDF uploads through the API is also requested. "

"an illustrated set of common http error codes"

"Max OS X application to allow for easy and quick uploading of documents into Google Docs, or uploading of jpeg photos into Picasa Web Albums. "

Barence writes "Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing. The six providers — BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse — will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing. Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffic "filtered" to prevent media files from being downloaded. The ISPs are reportedly reluctant to impose the BPI's preferred "three strikes and you're out" approach of cutting off users' broadband connections."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"CRF++ is a simple, customizable, and open source implementation of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) for segmenting/labeling sequential data."

"The European Court of Human Rights has ordered the Finnish government to pay out €34,000 because it failed to protect a citizen's personal data."

Anonymous writes "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, 'Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,' examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders."

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One of the nifty new features of the recently revamped Last.fm is that every tag that ever has been applied by Last.fm users to music now has its own page that contains everything Last.fm knows about the tag. The page shows the top artist for the tag, a wiki-style description of the tag, and a shoutbox where last.fm listeners can have a running conversation about the tag. The shoutbox seems like it will be a lot of fun - it's the place to go if you want to argue the finer points of technical death metal vs. melodic death metal. The current dialog in the emo shoutbox is particularly entertaining as fans try to protect their listening turf. Some selections:

• And what is it with everyone with the same goddamn haircut!
• Haha, it says Iron Maiden is emo.
• 'Flex94 tagged My Chemical Romance as ‘emo’.'What the hell is that.?
• James Blunt and Iron Maiden emo?! O.o
• OMG!! some people really don't know what is emo and how it sounds.... AFI, FOB, Blink182, Bullet for my valentine, Good Charlotte, Sum41, Placebo, Him, 3DG, Nirvana, Slipknot, 50cent... - EMO??? WOW... X_x some listeners are really stupid!

This is all getting a bit meta - people commenting on tags that other people apply to music. Maybe we can take this a bit further and let people moderate the comments that people are making about the tags that others are applying to the music. And then we can have meta-moderators to moderate the moderators ... ow - my head hurts.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."

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"Blackbirds and other thrushes often sunbathe, laid down and with wings outstretched. The sun is thought to straighten the birds feathers and help the preen oil to spread through the feathers."

The Indian government says that it has reached agreement with the United States on implementing a controversial civilian nuclear co-operation accord.

Clearleft have launched Silverback. I used the beta, and it was very nice.

"...his subject is Dutch trade with China in the 17th century. Starting from details in five of Vermeer's paintings he takes readers on a series of brilliantly circuitous mystery tours that reveal the savagery on which western civilisation was built"

Sitting in my RSS feedreader was an article by Paul Wlodarczyk titled “How XML Enables the Semantic Web“, which I think is incredibly wrong. I think XML is just one option for the overall idea behind the Semantic Web, and it’s not the only option.

I actually think that we should see the Semantic Web (and more specifically the Linked Data Web) as Format Agnostic. The truth of the matter is that the average web user (and business client) does not care at all about the underlying formats, they just want something that is useful and works (the more useful and the more stable the better). Linked Data is all about interconnecting information, and so as long as that information is objective, meaningful and processable then it can be turned into whatever format/framework you like (whether its Linked Data RDF, Topic Maps, DITA or even Microformats/RDFa based XHTML) from whatever format/framework is available (whether its Linked Data RDF, Topic Maps, DITA or even Microformats/RDFa based XHTML)… this is what being Format Agnostic means!

So when Paul writes:

In fact, creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in DITA.

I think that’s right, but I think it’s equally right to say one of the following:

• In fact creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in RDF/XML, RDF/N3 or RDF/Turtle
• In fact creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in (POSH) XHTML+RDFa
• In fact creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in (POSH) XHTML+Microformats
• In fact creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in XTM

The format is irrelevant, the key things we have to ask ourselves (as developers) when choosing a format/framework are:

1. Does the format express the full and true meaning of this data?
2. Does the format show the data in an objective manner?
3. Does it allow the data to be interconnected across the web using Dereferenceable URI’s? (aka is it capable of providing Linked Data)
4. Can it be sponged/scraped/transformed into another format/framework? (this might be by using technologies such as GRDDL, Fresnel, XSLT or something like a Virtuoso Sponger)

Let’s be pro-format-agnostic!

I invite your comments (especially from Paul, if you’re reading)

Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and, interestingly, the complaint is sealed".

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http://case.oncle-tom.net/2008/07/23/conventions-de-programmation-necessaire-maturite/ http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/post/2008/07/23/Mes-conventions-de-codage

OAUTH XMPP FOAF OpenId RDF

Bridging the semantic Web and Web 2.0 with Representational State Transfer (REST)

Le poète est le son que fait une baudruche en caoutchouc quand on presse dessus. Cela stresse les gens agés et fait rire les enfants.

2nd Century AD bust

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is essentially branding publicly available information as confidential. This 'puzzling contradiction' is the 'antithesis of the developer-friendly Apple Developer Connection' on which the iPhone SDK program is based, Yager contends. 'You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court — but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.' Anyone planning to launch an iPhone forum or open source project should have 'a lawyer draft your request for exemption, and make sure that the Apple staffer granting it personally commits to status as authorized to approve exceptions to the iPhone Registered Developer and iPhone SDK Agreements,' Yager warns."

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tommorris: _hex aka. earle was the first.
earle: Things to be proud of(?)

(2008-07-24 02:43)

Grablets writes "Using a link analysis algorithm similar to Google PageRank, researchers at the SANS Institute and SRI International have created a new Internet network defense service that rethinks the way network blacklists are formulated and distributed. The service, called Highly Predictive Blacklisting, exploits the relationships between networks that have been attacked by similar Internet sources as a means for predicting which attack sources are likely to attack which networks in the future. A free experimental version is currently available."

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According to initial reports, an announcement due later today will state that major ISPs in the UK have reached an agreement to work with the music industry to start mass warning file-sharers. The deal, brokered by the government, will see hundreds of thousands warned but not disconnected.

In what will be seen by the British Phonographic Industry as a partial victory in its war against file sharers, major ISPs in the UK have agreed to music industry demands to start sending out warning letters to those it accuses of sharing its copyright works.

The report states that the deal was agreed by six of the UK’s most prominent Internet Service Providers following intense government pressure. It’s estimated that these as-yet unnamed ISPs will send out hundreds of thousands of letters to suspected uploaders of music. The ISPs - thought to include Virgin Media who already did an early deal - are BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB.

Demands from the music industry to disconnect uploaders from the Internet have not been met by the ISPs nor insisted upon by the government as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had already stepped back from a government implemented ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ policy. One ISP, Virgin Media, already indicated that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.

However, it’s being reported that other measures may be taken against alleged file-sharers, including traffic management techniques being deployed to punish persistent offenders. As we reported earlier, this element is likely to be negotiated by the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom.

The Times is reporting that other steps may be taken by the government such as the introduction of an annual £30 ‘download tax’. Peter Jenner, a music industry player who has been supporting such a plan said that the tax could bring in enough turnover to support the music industry: “If you get enough people paying a small enough amount of money you can turn around the wheels of the music industry” he said. Although UK citizens are used to this type of charge with the current TV licensing system, this type of tax seems unlikely to succeed in the current environment.

A Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) and signed by all six ISPs states that not only must the ISPs commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but they must also help develop legal music services too. One can see how this might be attractive to certain ISPs, such as BSkyB who just days ago signed a deal with Universal to set up an online music service “to rival iTunes”.

All this will be backed up by an educational campaign to ensure that every customer knows that it is illegal to upload copyright music.

More on this breaking news as we get it during the day.

Update: Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI says reports of a levy are incorrect: “A levy is not an issue under discussion. It has not been discussed between us and government and as far as we are aware it is not on the table.”

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

ISPs To Send “Hundreds of Thousands” of File-Sharing Warnings

Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at Purdue University are developing a miniature refrigeration system, small enough to fit inside laptop computers. According to the researchers, the implementation of miniature refrigeration systems in computers can dramatically increase the amount of heat removed from the microchips, therefore boosting performance while simultaneously shrinking the size of computers."

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Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Burrosploitation" - originally published 7/23/2008 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

get_Rootin writes "That didn't take long. ZDNet is reporting that HD Moore has released exploit code for Dan Kaminsky's DNS cache poisioning vulnerability into the point-and-click Metasploit attack tool. From the article: 'This exploit caches a single malicious host entry into the target nameserver. By causing the target nameserver to query for random hostnames at the target domain, the attacker can spoof a response to the target server including an answer for the query, an authority server record, and an additional record for that server, causing target nameserver to insert the additional record into the cache.' Here's our previous Slashdot coverage."

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Brian Jordan and other readers sent in word that Google has taken the wraps off Knol, its expert-written challenger to Wikipedia. (We discussed Knol when it was announced last year.) Wired has an in-depth look. Knol's distinctions from Wikipedia are that authors are identified by their real names (and verified), and that they can share in ad revenue if they choose to. The service initially features a lot of medical articles, which is interesting considering that Medipedia also launched today. This medical wiki is backed by Harvard's and Stanford's medical schools.

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Cool giveaway from Tor books - ebooks + cover artwork

Parfois, il faut savoir relativiser l'intérêt du logiciel, notamment du logiciel libre. Quoi de plus approprié pour ce faire qu'un projet libre ? Et après ?

Licence : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Forum Boutique

"1. Find the EU identification mark code on any EU meat or dairy product 2. Enter the code in the Food Tracer search to find the corresponding food producer and site 3. Use [the] custom Food Industry Search to find... information on your food's producer

ruphus13 writes "Ubuntu and Canonical have been very active at OSCON this year. They showcased a new distro, announced improvements to their code-hosting platform, and made Mark Shuttleworth available for a couple of talks and panel sessions. Quoting: 'Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a complete distribution designed to run on Atom-based Netbook PCs. The main difference that sets it apart from its big brother Hardy Heron is the Ubuntu Mobile Edition (UME) Launcher, a user interface created specifically for use on the teensy screens and keyboards of today's popular ultra-portable computers.' Canonical also announced Version 2.0 of Launchpad, their code-hosting platform. Enhancements include 'a planned API that'll allow third-party applications to authenticate, query and modify data in the massive Launchpad database, without a user needing to manually access the system via a browser.' Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."

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After I thought more about RCRD LBL’s economics, I came to a couple conclusions.

I don’t think they’re selling their spots at the listed rates. I think the ads they are selling might be part of package deals with other sites that I don’t know about, because they can’t deliver enough traffic for major brands to pay attention to them. And I think the actual rates are lower.

I also think that I understand their business strategy. They’re able to put major brands inside the world of way-cool MP3 blogging without risking association with copyright infringement. It’s hip but also clean. The business is relying on their squeaky clean copyright status to charge a premium for ads. So even though I don’t think they’re getting the listed rates, I do think they’re getting much better rates than ordinary MP3 blogs.

This points towards an elegant and innovative business model.

Ordinarily internet music companies are forked between two deaths. If they keep it clean they get killed on royalties for licensing. If they’re fast and loose with copyright, they get killed on legal bills and eventually are forced to license anyway. But either problem assumes that they have to carry a broad selection of everything with cultural presence.

RCRD LBL avoids both forks by doing their own A&R, then packaging the results as a blog. The reason they’re a label is that they do their own research work to find obscure gems. It’s important that these are obscure, because it means that licensing costs can be kept down. It’s important that they do their own research, because there aren’t yet strong discovery tools for digging out the gems in the mountain of unknowns. The reason they’re a blog is that they aren’t expected to carry everything everywhere. If they were a search engine like Seeqpod or an encompassing content browser environment like All Music Guide, they would need to carry music that they couldn’t afford to license. The blog format puts them in position to limit what they release.

Note that the importance of lowering royalty costs doesn’t imply that the musicians are getting screwed. If the musicians earn exactly the same as they do on a traditional label, RCRD LBL can still have a winning cost structure by keeping royalties that would normally go to label and publishing bills.

Will it work? It depends on execution. They need to get their traffic up enough to do business with the brand advertisers who will pay a premium for RCRD LBL’s clean but edgy product line. This range is about a million uniques a month.

ydrol writes "After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, I was ready to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had not seen before. However, I was disappointed to discover that a lot of the conversion tools either don't use SMP at all, or don't balance the workload evenly across processors, or require ugly hacks to use SMP (e.g. invoking distributed encoding options). I get the impression that open source projects are a bit slow on the uptake here? Which open source video conversion apps take full native advantage of SMP? (And before you ask, no, I don't want to pick up the code and add SMP support myself, thanks.)"

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describes the grid behind recent redesign

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."

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Over on CASH Music, Deerhoof released a new song as sheet music, and did it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial license. Their version is a nice hand made piece of writing with a good vibe, but it’s easier to work with this stuff if it’s digitized so I retranscribed their source into Sibelious. Given that I was able to auto-create a MIDI file, an MP3 file, and parts for each instrument, including guitar tablature.

There is no Deerhoof recording of this song yet, just a how-to in the form of sheet music. I am in awe that the band *led* with the interactive element in this release.

The MIDI file can lead straight to remixes. And the MP3 I produced from it can give people an idea of what this song sounds like, which most people won’t get until recordings come out.

The goods are all over in the dedicated page for this on my music site.

Barence writes "Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the Web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos. The company claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers' comments. 'Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware,' according to Sophos's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. 'It's head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services].'" Sophos believes that Blogger is favored because, being part of Google, it gets spidered early and often.

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Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django developer's reference shelf. In particular, the book's emphasis on demonstrating best practices while building complete projects does an excellent job of accelerating an understanding of Django's most powerful features — in a realistic, pragmatic setting — and which a developer will be able to leverage in very short order." Read below for the rest of Greg's review.

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KentuckyFC writes "Earlier this year, Paris-based Aldebaran-Robotics picked up $8 million in venture capital funding to help commercialize its NAO humanoid robot. The target market for this device is research labs working on the next generation of robotic hardware and software. Today, the company has posted a detailed spec of NAO on the arXiv saying that it expects the robot to cost about $15,000 each. That's cheap compared to other humanoids. Fuitsu's HOAP humanoids cost $50,000 each and various estimates price Honda's Asimo at $1 million per bot, although they are not for sale. Aldebaran-Robotics says that NAO's cost should come down to about $6,000 as production ramps up."

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bigsmoke writes "So, all your servers run on RAID. You back up religiously. You're even sure that your backups are recoverable. But do you also need a UPS? According to Halfgaar (on Slashdot before to promote better Linux backup practices), yes, usually you do. He argues that despite technological advancements such as file system journaling, power failures can still cause data loss in most setups."

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SPARQL benchmark comparing Sesame, SDB, Virtuoso and D2R.

A discovery leads to questions about whether the odds of people sharing genetic profiles are sometimes higher than portrayed. Calling the finding meaningless, the FBI has sought to block such inquiry.

chareverie writes "A law just passed in New York now requires labels for violent content in video games that are already rated, as well as having parent-controlled lockout features installed in consoles by 2010. The law has caused an uproar with civil rights groups who claim that such a law is unconstitutional. A legal challenge is already in the works by the New York Civil Liberties Union who cite that similar laws that have been brought to courts in California, Illinois, Minessota, and Washington state have been deemed as unconstitutional. NYCLU legislative director Robert Perry also says that the 'new law is a "back door" way of regulating video game content.'"

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snydeq writes "Jailed IT admin Terry Childs relinquished his hold over San Francisco's multimillion-dollar FiberWAN, handing his administrative passwords over to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was 'the only person he felt he could trust.' Childs is still being held on $5 million bail for his lockout of the city's FiberWAN, a case that has been called into question since an insider came forward with details about both the network and Childs himself. The case hinges on No Service Password Recovery commands Childs allegedly configured onto several Cisco devices, as well as dial-up and DSL modems the SFPD has discovered that would allow unauthorized connections to the FiberWAN. Childs intends to 'expose the utter mismanagement, negligence, and corruption at DTIS, which if left unchecked, will in fact place the City of San Francisco in danger,' according to his motion. The Department of Telecom and IS has cut 200 of its 350 IT positions since 2000 — pressure that may have contributed to Childs' actions, according to interviews with current and former DTIS staffers. Newsom secured the passwords without first telling the DTIS that he was meeting with Childs."

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danbri: Anyone got a crawl of the bbc news site?

(2008-07-23 14:37)

the4thdimension writes "MySpace has joined a coalition of other big-name e-services in support of OpenID. If you aren't familiar with the OpenID coalition, they are a group that seeks to allow users to create a single account/password set to be used on a number of services. Such services already signed up include: Google's Blogger, Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, Vox, LiveJournal, and others." Reader gbjbaanb adds a link to the BBC's coverage and points out that MySpace's 100 million users would mean nearly a doubling of the approximately 120 million OpenID accounts now in use, writing: "Initially support is to use MySpace OpenIDs as providers only — i.e. you cannot logon to MySpace with an OpenID created elsewhere, but that policy will change in the future. This should help to make OpenID the de-facto login mechanism for the Internet, now if only Microsoft would support it, there are plenty OSS OpenID libraries available."

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nice tab switcher

Several themes about the value of libraries must be stressed in order to increase it, according to a new OCLC report, "From Awareness to Funding: A Study of Library Support in America". The report was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; its fin

oliderid writes "The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been unveiled. It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia and will allow Europe to participate directly in crew transportation.The reusable ship was conceived to carry four people towards the Moon, rivaling the US Ares/Orion system. This project is the Plan A for the European Space agency. The plan B is an evolution of the ATV proposed by a consortium of European companies led by Astrium."

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Incon writes "Builder AU reports that Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."

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David Barrett writes "If you sell three billion ads a month and can't break even, what do you do? Drop prices by 40% and switch business models, apparently. Is this an isolated incident, or does it contribute to the growing pile of evidence that ad inventory is overpriced industry-wide, with Google being the worst offender due to its policy of requiring minimum bids on keywords that would otherwise go for cheap? Check out this analysis on my blog and make up your own mind."

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