Un journaliste travaillant "undercover" espérait pouvoir enregistrer des présentations compromettante durant une réunion de spécialiste de la sécurité informatique. Mal lui en a pris: les organisateur ayant été mis au courant, ils ont organisé un nouveau jeu: "Spot the undercover journalist". Résultat: une horde de participant poursuivant la journaliste pour la filmer et la photographier.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Friday, 3 August 2007
Google mashup editor in limited beta
The Google Mashup Editor is available in limited beta. Reading the introduction (I'm not part of the beta :-)), it seems to be a cool product which facilitates development of mashups with eg easy access to feeds and their structure and Google's infrastructures such as maps. It's all built with GWT. I'm curious to test it, and see how this compares with yahoo's pipes
Yahoo gets behind Hadoop
Hadoop, the (recent) Apache implementation of MapReduce in Java, has seen its developer Doug Cutting hired by Yahoo.
The funny thing is that the first time I read about MapReduce was in a (very interesting) paper titled "Why functional programming matters" which was written in .... 1984!
It's not always the lates technology that brings advancement: good use of existing technology can do a lot too. Ever heard of Ajax? ;-)
The funny thing is that the first time I read about MapReduce was in a (very interesting) paper titled "Why functional programming matters" which was written in .... 1984!
It's not always the lates technology that brings advancement: good use of existing technology can do a lot too. Ever heard of Ajax? ;-)
Amazon Flexible Payment Beta available
Amazon has started a limited beta of Flexible Payment System that they describe as "the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers".
Features look interesting, and try to make micropayments possible (I remember having read somewhere that Amazon was seen as the only company that would be able to make micropayments viable due to the amount of credit card transfers they do monthly): for example you can aggregate several micro-payments in one transaction.
It also features easy billing of Amazon shoppers as the same credential can be used to log in Amazon and pay with FPS. FPS also uses the data stored in the shopper's account, so no need to ask credit card numbers.
It seems flexibility is key to their offer. Apparently it would be possible to build a market place where you aren't the paid entity. Their example is proposing mp3 downloads where the payment goes to the artist, with the market place getting a share of the transaction.
But what about the fees? Well, here's the situation for credit cards: For a payment higher than 10$, Amazon charge 2.9% + 0.30$, same as Paypal. But Paypal lowers the fee for transaction higher than 3000$. And Amazon changes the fee for payments lower than 10$: 5.0% + $0.05. Google checkout is free for the moment, but will charge 2%+0.20$ from january 2008.
When you compare these solutions, it becomes clear that Amazon is looking to grab market share in smaller payments: the smaller the payment, the cheaper they are compared to their competitors, the biggest the payment, le least competitive they are (except if you qualify for their volume discounts, which give you the same rates as Paypal):
Now for the bad news: this beta service is reserved to developers having a credit card issued by an american bank.... As Google Checkout is only available to US and UK vendors, this leaves me with only Paypal as a viable solution. It's working fine for me in Myowndb and Profoss, but although the documentation is complete, using their development sandbox is time consuming, the forum is not great (just did a search that ended with a "ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'") and the lack of competition made them leave useful features unimplemented (eg reactivate a subscription that expired).
FPS is the latest Amazon webservice released. They started in 2002 and have built business on each of them, as Jeff describes.
Features look interesting, and try to make micropayments possible (I remember having read somewhere that Amazon was seen as the only company that would be able to make micropayments viable due to the amount of credit card transfers they do monthly): for example you can aggregate several micro-payments in one transaction.
It also features easy billing of Amazon shoppers as the same credential can be used to log in Amazon and pay with FPS. FPS also uses the data stored in the shopper's account, so no need to ask credit card numbers.
It seems flexibility is key to their offer. Apparently it would be possible to build a market place where you aren't the paid entity. Their example is proposing mp3 downloads where the payment goes to the artist, with the market place getting a share of the transaction.
But what about the fees? Well, here's the situation for credit cards: For a payment higher than 10$, Amazon charge 2.9% + 0.30$, same as Paypal. But Paypal lowers the fee for transaction higher than 3000$. And Amazon changes the fee for payments lower than 10$: 5.0% + $0.05. Google checkout is free for the moment, but will charge 2%+0.20$ from january 2008.
When you compare these solutions, it becomes clear that Amazon is looking to grab market share in smaller payments: the smaller the payment, the cheaper they are compared to their competitors, the biggest the payment, le least competitive they are (except if you qualify for their volume discounts, which give you the same rates as Paypal):
| Amount | Amazon fee | Paypal fee | Google fee |
| 1 | 0,1 | 0,33 | 0,22 |
| 5 | 0,3 | 0,45 | 0,3 |
| 11 | 0,62 | 0,62 | 0,42 |
| 3001 | 87,33 | 75,33 | 60,22 |
Now for the bad news: this beta service is reserved to developers having a credit card issued by an american bank.... As Google Checkout is only available to US and UK vendors, this leaves me with only Paypal as a viable solution. It's working fine for me in Myowndb and Profoss, but although the documentation is complete, using their development sandbox is time consuming, the forum is not great (just did a search that ended with a "ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'") and the lack of competition made them leave useful features unimplemented (eg reactivate a subscription that expired).
FPS is the latest Amazon webservice released. They started in 2002 and have built business on each of them, as Jeff describes.
Remote Device Acces by Nokia
Nokia now proposes a free service to Forum Nokia members: you can test your application on different Nokia devices through the internet, and it's called Remote Device Access.
The E90 isn't there yet, but it could be a good way to see how it behaves with different applications available before I possibly get one. The cool thing is that it's not an emulator, as the name implies. What you see is the display of a real device connected to Nokia's server. You reserve the device you want to test for a timeslot, and you can play with it. Here's a blog post describing how it works.
The E90 isn't there yet, but it could be a good way to see how it behaves with different applications available before I possibly get one. The cool thing is that it's not an emulator, as the name implies. What you see is the display of a real device connected to Nokia's server. You reserve the device you want to test for a timeslot, and you can play with it. Here's a blog post describing how it works.
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Extjs 1.1 released!
Wow, first Yui 2.3.0 and now Extjs 1.1!
This is the first stable released not mandating the use of a third party library (YUI, prototype or jquery) which gives a way to have a smaller size for the base library to download in a web page to use Ext's power.
The HTML editor is also a big addition to the library.
I've already been using 1.1 beta in production, and it was really solid and enabled me to build really advanced features very rapidly. And as I'm not a designer, Extjs' good look by default is really a strong point for me (Have you seen the layouts possibilities available?).
If you haven't made your choice on which Ajax library to use, take a look at Extjs! You get flexible data sources (reading XML, JSON) that you can use in different widgets (grid, combo box), layout facilities to build desktop-like apps, localisation, inline editing grids and lots of other widgets, a fast CSS selector, great documentation, active community to ask and reply to questions, user developed extensions, etc....
Congrats to Jack Slocum and all contributors for this excellent release. Looking forward to what Ext 2.0 will bring us!
This is the first stable released not mandating the use of a third party library (YUI, prototype or jquery) which gives a way to have a smaller size for the base library to download in a web page to use Ext's power.
The HTML editor is also a big addition to the library.
I've already been using 1.1 beta in production, and it was really solid and enabled me to build really advanced features very rapidly. And as I'm not a designer, Extjs' good look by default is really a strong point for me (Have you seen the layouts possibilities available?).
If you haven't made your choice on which Ajax library to use, take a look at Extjs! You get flexible data sources (reading XML, JSON) that you can use in different widgets (grid, combo box), layout facilities to build desktop-like apps, localisation, inline editing grids and lots of other widgets, a fast CSS selector, great documentation, active community to ask and reply to questions, user developed extensions, etc....
Congrats to Jack Slocum and all contributors for this excellent release. Looking forward to what Ext 2.0 will bring us!
YUI 2.3.0 released
Version 2.3.0 of Yahoo's User Interface library is available. Although I'm using Extjs, which can now be used independently from any other library, I still keep an eye on this library, and it's good to see it progress and add interesting stuff (rich text editor, a loader utility, an image loader, unit testing, etc). The documentation available with YUI is impressive and lets developers get up to speed rapidly.
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