the tool is called “Glide Effortless”, and rumours about it being a UI wonder and all, I had to try it out for myself.

As normal procedure I always try to scan the site for validity and trust matters, by asking myself a set of rather simple questions; who are these people? where do they come from?, do I trust them? and last but not least what’s the catch? (price)

I was a little confused by the obvious lack of any pricing information, but decided to try and sign up.. All went pretty good.. Hmm suddenly it required my full address, and I mean required as in you have to fill it to continue. Eager as I was I happily typed it in.. And hit next button on the sign-up wizard…

Then it happened, I was asked to choose a product subscription type ranging from free 100mb account to some expensive ones, seemingly only to differentiate by the data storage limitations. Not being a complete retard I choose free account as my first choice, strangely enough this was the last available option – they seem to think free version should be your last choice!!? Not so logical approach since everyone naturally wants to evaluate such a product before buying it (with all the hype this product should sell itself, should it not??).

Then I was presented with a nice screen telling me to give away my creditcard information, even though I had choosen a free subscription, they wrote they needed the information in order to validate my personal information.

Oh well.. The result was that, I like most sane people; hit the “Cancel” button, the wizard closed – and I will continue to try and live happily without this marvel of state-of-the-art oracle of an application…

I did however get a good laugh when reading about their patent pending ui “navigation bubbles”, which more or less resembles 200 game ui’s already.

Glide Effortless

“IT services provider Atos Origin has predicted a forthcoming change in the software landscape based on the results of a survey it has carried out in conjunction with the UK’s National Computing Centre. The survey, which was compiled through over 140 web-based questionnaires completed by senior UK IT professionals in May and June, indicated that over 60% believe open source will either increase its presence in certain business areas
or be a fundamental component in core IT systems, while
73% expect open source to develop within their organizations’ IT strategy over the next five years.”

Slashdot | Atos Origin Predicts Open Source Landscape

p.s.: I will sadly not attend, since I have postponed hollidays for the not-so-near future.

COPYFIGHT

I’m currently reading Joel’s latest book, so obviously this had to be posted promptly

Doctor O writes “Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware
fame) has some good points and fun with numbers on the quality of programmers and whether it is more profitable to go with cheap or good programmers. His point is that a good programmer will simply create code of a quality that average programmers never can create. An interesting read.”

Slashdot | Hiring Good Programmers Matters

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary that will continue the development, distribution and marketing of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation will be a taxable entity (that is, a for-profit rather than a non-profit) but the Foundation is eager to emphasise that it will pursue the same public benefit goals as the Foundation itself and will not be driven purely by revenue goals.

The change will not affect the day-to-day development of Mozilla, with the current system of module owners, drivers, reviewers and super-reviewers staying in place. End-users are unlikely to notice any difference either, though the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation will eventually have separate websites. At the moment, only Firefox and Thunderbird will be developed under the auspices of the Mozilla Corporation; other projects, such as Camino and SeaMonkey, will continue to be overseen by the Mozilla Foundation…

Full story:
Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation – MozillaZine Talkback

Mozilla Foundation Reorganization [RSS]

The vote was 648 votes against, 14 in favor, with 18 abstentions.”

Full story:
* European Parliament rejects software patents, again

* Slashdot | Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

* Who Will Google Buy Next? | kuro5hin.org

The opensolaris.org web site will be the center for OpenSolaris activity. The source code for one of the Solaris operating system’s most advanced features – Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available here. And there’s more to come. We invite you to take a look. Expect to see buildable Solaris code here in Q2 2005.

* OpenSolaris.org