• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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You will regularly hear religious fundamentalists and Inteligent Design supporters abusing the word ‘theory’ for their own ends. They say things like “Evolution is only a theory” to imply that it is a half-baked idea that we’re not really sure of. This invariably really annoys scientists and gets them all agitated because in science, a theory is actually something very strong, well developed, consistent with reality, and well supported by a lot of observational evidence. The weak wishy-washy stuff should be described as conjectures and hypotheses, only the solid well supported stuff should get the honour of being a theory. However, in the public’s mind that distinction is just not there. The average person on the street refers to things that are really conjectures and hypotheses as theories and things that should be theories as accepted facts. Who is to blame for this? Believe it or not, I think the scientists have to take a large share of the blame. Read more

Just a quick follow-on from my initial review of my new 17″ MacBookPro. In my initial review I had said that the MBP does not get very hot but that is not entirely true. It is true that when just running on the battery it gets significantly less hot than my old Pentium 4 Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook however, while it is charging it does get annoyingly hot. Still not quite as hot as the LifeBook but the battery it self gets hot enough to be un-comfortable on the legs. However, the base of the 17″ MBP is more than big enough so you can easily sit it on your lap in such a way that the hot bit is not resting on your legs!

Following on from my review of the 17″ MacBookPro yesterday I got to play with a 13″ Black MacBook today. I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. The black is horrible and tarnishes instantly. The machine I was playing with had had nothing more done to it than have it’s initial setup done and it already looked like it was a few years old. I could get over the look of it but the screen is just too small for me with too poor a resolution and the keyboard is terrible. It looks ‘unique’ which I can live with but then I tried to type with it and was not at all impressed. On a more positive note it is not too heavy and feels much more sturdy and robust than the old iBooks. It’s also very fast to boot and apps load quickly (as you’d expect from a CoreDuo machine). I guess if you had an iBook the MacBook will feel like an upgrade but if you had one of the small PowerBooks you’ll really feel like you’ve gone down in the world. Having said that I only got to play with it for a few minutes so this should be taken as nothing more than ‘first impressions’, this is FAR from an exhaustive review.

I’m typing this in a swelteringly hot terminal in Valencia Spain waiting for my plane to arrive and hopping that the thunder and lighting in the distance stays in the distance long enough for us to get outta here! Anyhow, I’ve had my 17″ MacBookPro for a week and a half now so I think I have enough experience with it at this stage to go a head and give it a review! BTW, the machine I got has the standard 1GB of RAM, the glossy 17″ monitor and I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB hard disk. Read more

Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more

Having just finished re-reading all the HP books from one right through to six I think now is a good time for me to write down my thoughts on what the important hints are with relation to book seven that JKR has littered through the books. It is a well known fact that JKR has been dropping us hints and fore-shadowing stuff right from the start so I re-read the books taking note of things I interpreted as clues that have not yet come to anything as of the end of book six. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a number of articles that follow on from this one, each one focusing on one hint or a related set of hints. I’m going to kick off the series with one of the simpler clues which comes form book three, Petigrew’s debt to Harry. Read more

Having recently updated my opinion on iWeb from “it’s OK” to “it sucks”, I’ve now gone one step further and decided that it REALLY sucks! I just did a very minor upgrade from iWeb 1.1 to iWeb 1.1.1 and it broke my site. I can’t really put it any simpler than that, it just broke my site. Read more

Tim O’Reilly has finally weighed in with a response to this mess and although I don’t agree with everything he says, I do think he’s thinking along more acceptable lines in general than the CMP letter would have led one to believe. The following quote is the important part that says what I felt needed to be said:

But I’m really mindful of the fact that Web 2.0 has become so successful as a meme that we’re not looking at a traditional brand name situation. This controversy is also bad for my most important brand, my own name, especially since O’Reilly and not CMP is taking all the heat! So I’m going to be talking with CMP about this situation over the next couple of days, and will see if we can come up with a solution that will satisfy our reasonable desire to protect the name of the conference while taking into account the dual role of “Web2.0” — as a brand for our conferences and as a handy meme for discussions of this phenomenal technology.

I am a bit annoyed at his insistence that Tom Raftrey owes him an apology though, I don’t think that’s fair.

Related Posts:

• A Darker Side of O’Reilly
• And The Web 2.0 Fun Continues

I posted about this yesterday after I was sent a link to the post on Tom Raftery’s blog about O’Reilly sending lawyers after an Irish Conference. I was firstly shocked and secondly annoyed about it so I decided I’d keep an eye on it and see how this all evolved. Before this I never quite realised the power of blogging … it has really opened my eyes and the blog sphere is positively buzzing about this little doozey and O’Reilly are feeling the heat! From my spin through the blogsphere the first thing I note is a unanimous agreement that O’Reilly made a HUGE booboo by sending the lawyers in on this one as a first resort and so close to the date of the conference. This has achieved only two things, it has made O’Reilly look so bad that techies all over the web are vowing to take their book business elsewhere and given so much free press to IT@Cork that their conference is sure to sell out! The second thing that even the few O’Reilly apologists I came across seem to agree on is that “Web2.0” isn’t really even a trademarkable term! Read more

I was more than a bit surprised to see a company I have a lot of respect for acting the complete prick and bullying and Irish IT conference because they are using the term Web2.0 in their title. Regardless of what O’Reilly think I really don’t think they can Service Mark a commonly used term like Web2.0. I’m pretty sure there is precedence out there on this kind of thing. Personally I hate the term Web2.0 and find it a turn off where ever I see it so I’d love to see it die a death but I’m not on for having big American corporations come in to Ireland and start bullying Irish institutions.

*boo hiss*

Mind you at least the good news is that the bad press O’Reilly got in the blog-sphere had the desired effect and O’Reilly have caved in and are letting the conference go a head this year, but not in future.

Here’s a link with more details: www.tomrafteryit.net/oreilly-trademarks-web-20-and-sets-lawyers-on-itcork/

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