SBC DotNet Weblog

I have decided to give Radio Userland another try - that software really is quite buggy but rumor has it that they are really going to do something about it. (It may be that users are abandoning it for TypePad or Blogger). We'll see..

I have been using Radio Userland for well over 2.5 years and it has a lot of my prior content. I'll post my non-technical topics there.

Normally, I don't think much of what John Dvorak writes. He often dunks Microsoft with anecdotes and rants - seeing that he has made most of his career pushing Microsoft products till FLOSS came along which he favors very zealously.

These two amusing postings by him captures his sentiments about People Networking stuff (suprisingly it has nothing to do with Microsoft) -

The New Networking Crock
Business Networking Systems, Dead Already?

Chapter 6 of  Effective C# -   Distinguish between Value Types and Reference Types is here [PDF format]. Better still - get the book: Effective C#.

I got this via Patrick Tissegham who got it via Joris - SharePoint Portal Server is MSFT's fastest growing product with 30m licenses!

That's Portal server (not WSS) licenses and you can imagine the number of clients associated with it. That truly is remarkable!

Private Syndication (be it via RSS or other formats) is back as a discussion topic - Dare Obasanjo mentions it as a RSS Bandit feature accomodation,  Tim Bray lays out some commercial value-added from EBay or your bank and Dwight Shih's 'Say No To Private Syndication'. The latter views it more as an issue of risk in privacy and trust. I view it as a "new News market" evolution - quite soon, you will pay for content from the RSS Pundits (via PayPal integrated into their weblog site of course). Feeding you expert opinions, advice and rubric that you can't get anywhere else fast.

Why so? Private syndication RSS feeds would enjoy more First Amendment freedoms like the HBO TV channel and soon, Howard Stern on Sirius satellite radio and you may get away with similar law-suits currently faced by ThinkSecret.

Stuart Henshall describes a calling card that one can use with Skype. It gives a literal meaning to 'calling cards'.

Dare Obasanjo's recent piece on Folksonomies, Taxonomies and Metacrap (shouldn't that be Volksonomies?) would provoke cognitive psychologists and computer scientists alike. Machine representation of semantics is preceded by knowledge representation (e.g., semantic networks) first and it defines the vocabulary also. This task has been ongoing from both sides of the fence - cognition and AI. Language semantics is an extremely difficult entity to emulate - ambiguity abounds (see Wittgenstein's language thinking concepts). Machinists have had  limited success in  a very limited capacity - Terry Winograd's SHRDLU in the "small blocks world" is a good example. I recall working on SHRDLU (in LISP) in a grad course in the mid-80s - it was quite amazing to see the machine respond to your queries (with meaning et al).

Current effort using  XML tags are also represented in Topic Maps which shows tremendous potential but that too is restricted to the "small world knowledge domain". A fine example of domain expertise in HealthCare is SNOMED which  makes healthcare knowledge and terminologies more palatable to the machines. Marry SNOMED with TopicMaps and you have some promise. But this marriage should be presided and blessed by the domain experts first rather than XML-Tag-happy constructs.

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Alex Barnett points to a thought-provoking piece by Jack Shafer.

There is no 'hype' here - any new idea has an incubatory period which brings in excitement (commonly misinterpreted as 'hype'). Blogging has rattled the Big Media companies and macho journalists alike. They keep forgetting that the First Amendment protects Big Media companies, macho journalists and puny webloggers equally. The main difference this time is that the puny webloggers have a direct access to a media channel - the Internet. This may change if Big Media companies lobby the legislators to tilt the new media channel to their favor.

The future does look exciting.