Doubt's Log

I mini project would be to write a upnp based presence protocol. When someone is logged on, they show up.

UPnP Lives!
The EETimes has an article talking about the current state of the home device communication stardard arena. The first UPnP device standard is the Internet Gateway Device Control which I know that Ben Nick did at least a little bit of grunt work on. It's also being said that the first

Got an XBOX yesterday at gamecrazy. It's a cool thing :)

Joel talks about some of the design desisions for his company's app. He decided not to do the browser thing, he decided not to do the xml thing.

Here is a feel ofthe disconnect between microsoft, and some of the world outside of microsoft is thinking about security.

What microsoft is thinking.
What others think.

Then... when you think you saw everything, the high rated mod's on /. are actually discussing things intelligently. On further investigation though... this is because all the kneejerk lamers and morons got thier say in during the first article about this.

This last weekend I saw a french film called amelie, and a play called DeathTrap. The movie was about this introverted and imaginative girl who does good in paris. This lady has quite the smile, and the whole movie is really funny. The play on the otherhand was okay but not spectacular. It featured more self references then I had seen in a play before. The overall effect was not anything special, instead I guess it packed the same punches that most "thrillers" do. oh well.

Last night I exercised with a heart monitor. It was quite a nifty thing. My heart rate was at about 120 just walking into the exercise room. It went to 140 during warm up, and mjourd got me to try pushing and holding it to different numbers; 150, 160. The coolest single thing was all the different machines picked up the signal. It's the sorta thing about networking that is cool.

After the half an hour warm up, I did a half hour on a bike at 160. I tried to get up to 170, but I forgot that I left the bike set at 160, so it lowered the resistance as I tried to up my heart rate. I fixed this for the last two minutes, and it worked well.

I did a more complete set of pull ups in the gravitrons. It's cool to be able to do a pull up even if the machine is letting you cheat heavily.

I then did the stair climber machine. At the lowest setting 1, I was at 175. At setting 2, I went up to 184. At setting 3 I was at 190-193. That would explain why I could never stick to level 3 for any length of time.

Cool down was back on this free runner like machine. It was set for interval, and my job was to stay below 140 for the low interval and go to 140-160 for the high intervals. The whole heart monitor thing is cool; I'm going to have to buy one of them.

Instead of stretching after cool down, this time we a little bit of the weight machines.

There are lots of people reacting to the Microsoft settlement. Here is a list of reponses and my summary:

• Dave Winer's The Microsoft settlement
  
  Dave expects the government to make correction to the browser market. However the court case talked about monopoly maintenance, not an unlawful new monopoly. Hence it is inappropriate to "correct" that market. Preventing further maintenance behavior is a good enough goal and the existence of direct restrictions in a punishment in itself. The maintenance behaviors were illegal not in themselves but because Microsoft was ruled a monopoly. He also dismisses the OEM market which is especially funny because the OEM market is the market the Microsoft was declared a monopoly in. His final comment is from the perspective of ISVs. The settlement seems to me to have two "customers" the OEM market and ISV’s. The ISV get RAND access to anything Microsoft does on the wire; which is a big deal for building interoperating and competing products.
  
  
• WSJ: Finally, a Settlement
  
  The WSJ seems to like the settlement because of how it does the right actions without getting the lawyers involved. It also talks about the state's AGs motivations at this point.
  
  
• Salon has two articles Getting away with it and Is Bill Gates' nightmare over?
  
  The first article sums it up and says that all the bad stuff that came out in trial demands hasher penalties. He says that behavioral remedies are not enough. This though flys a bit in the face of the appeal court judges who said that even if they didn't throw out the parts of the case they did, a structural remedy makes no sense. He does make one semi intresting point about the DOJ not going after the much more difficult tying standard. It is my belief that the DOJ didn't stand a chance of meeting that standard and wanted to do the peverbial "bank".
  
  The second article has a lot of reposnses from different people. In the first part of the article I disagree with the loophole claim. The DRM claim is just plain article hype. The areas are involved with security by obsecurity, which I personally don't like, but the claim it is a offlimits to competition is silly. The professor has valid points that the "if you fail to comply" sections are weak, but he doesn't seem to understand that a lesser settlement is appropriate after sizeable chunks of the lawsuit was hammered off by the appeals court. There were a number of people who saw it from the "they didn't do anything wrong" view, which is correct outside of the monopoly context. The FSF folks are upset that microsoft isn't sharing the software for "Free" and that IP isn't being given away.