Cnet’s News.com has an article entitled Microsoft: Open source ‘not reliable or dependable’. It’s about comments Jonathan Murray (Microsoft Europe’s VP and and CTO) made to BBC World in the first part of a documentary called The Code Breakers. Murray states:

Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model. And again, at the end of the day, you make the choice based on what has the highest value to you.

I find it absolutely hilarious that a representative from a company with notoriously unstable and insecure software actually said that.

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I just hit Flickr to check out one of the pictures from the housewarming party and noticed they’ve rolled out a new version of the site.

The changes look pretty slick so far, though I haven’t been able to really play with it much. I just hope they didn’t change anything with the API that’d cause FlickrExport to break. I guess I’ll find out tonight when I try to upload the pictures I took at the coast yesterday.

Nice work, folks :-)

Update #2:

Ryan (the author of Curved Air) has explained what happened and I’m happy with his explanation. Water under the bridge, I say. Good luck with Curved Air, Ryan.

Update:

It appears that, as of this morning, the post is gone now. I have no idea what prompted him to take it down—I didn’t even email him about it. Maybe he saw my post about it and felt guilty or something, who knows. At any rate, it’s gone and hopefully a lesson has been learned :-)

Original Post:

So I was looking at my Mint stats a minute ago, and I noticed a referrer from http://curved-air.blogspot.com. I thought that was interesting since I’d never heard of that site before, so I clicked through to check it out.

Lo and behold, the first post on that site was a very slightly modified copy of my original post (i.e., before the update) on the subject. The only things he changed were to add two words (“BLOGZOT 2.0” and “CodingMonkeys”) and to change the price from $9.80 to $5.00. The last paragraph of his post even links to my previous post about blogZOT! as if it were his own.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It’s obvious he copied my post and then changed a word here and there. I guess the upside is that he actually did take the time to modify it (even though it was ever so slightly). I suppose he could’ve just copied and pasted and let it be at that. Still, I can’t help but feeling that the line here is very thin. What are your thoughts on this sort of thing? Am I overreacting?

The city of Portland has announced that it chose MetroFi to provide a combination of free, advertising-supported, and paid wireless service over the 134 square miles of the city. According to the article, it should be live in one to two years. Let me be the first to say woo hoo! :-)

Before I get into this, let me say that in general I like most of Google’s products and services. That said, I tend to have one huge complaint about them (which appears to be becoming a trend in new products they release)—their lack of support for Safari.

There are two glaring examples that come to mind right off the bat. The first is the Google Talk (a.k.a., Gtalk) functionality that was added to Google Mail (a.k.a., Gmail). While the normal Gmail interface works fine, the Gtalk stuff is only supported by Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.

The second is the newly released Google Calendar. I visited the site today and got a message telling me my browser wasn’t supported. Sigh.

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