Petroglyphs

Regarding shame, apparently Microsoft has none. Not only do they plagiarize the content of pages from Google–as well as the HTML code and formatting–they have the gall to claim copyright on it. And they make it worse: to wit,

Original semantically-marked-up version: <h4>Googlebot: Google's Web Crawler </h4>

Crappy Microsoft code: <FONT size=5>MSNBot</FONT>

Update: I was about to call Google on the same thing–copying the BackRub FAQ–until I realized that Google is BackRub.

Two new entries today in Tim Bray’s TPSM series. He’s started his actual analysis of and against the candidate predictors Management Approval and Standardization. Again, I mostly agree with his rankings and explanations, except for iTV.

The first predictor, Management Approval, shows nothing more clearly than that one of these things is not like the other. Unlike twelve of the fourteen technologies he’s evaluating (the other exception being VRML) iTV doesn’t have much use, and hence little visibility, in a general corporate IT setting; management approval is about as applicable to iTV in business as it is to four-slice bagel toasters. In the cable industry, however, iTV doesn’t exactly sneak in to an MSO without a lot of involvement from higher-ups. As for being featured in Forbes more than once, Google begs to differ. iTV at least rates the same 7 as the WWW, albeit in a specific domain.

In his Standardization analysis of the iTV space Bray shows a little of what I complained about initially: his view of the tech seems to be limited to the early 1990s. Today’s iTV tech is, if not dominated, then at least highly influenced by standards, and is becoming more so every day. It’s been said that the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from, and iTV certainly proves that rule. It deserves at least the same 3 rating that UNIX/C receives for Posix work, which while useful has never been central to the story; modern iTV is hardly a proprietary offering from a single vendor with poor developer relations (although certain implementations remain so), and thus probably rates about a 5 for the similarity of current settop developments to the Browser Wars.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Bray’s next pseudo-random topic will be Investor support, and predict that the results will begin to coalesce. (It’s not that far, really… he almost states the latter in the last paragraph of Standardization.)

Tim Bray has started a new series of articles, this time on something he calls the Technology Predictor Success Matrix. As with most of the posts on his weblog (and astonishingly few on this one), it’s quite interesting, even at this early stage. What piqued my interest is an item in his list of Technology Losers that’s near and dear to my heart and wallet: Interactive TV.

Bray asks those who protest the inclusion of their pet technology–like me–to consider the answers to two questions: Are people using them? Did anyone make serious money based on them? And you’ll generally get two negatives. For what he appears to regard as interactive television–summed up in the quote I’ve used to title this entry, which he admits is the put-down version–he’s probably right. I don’t know of anyone who’s been able to click on a scene from Friends to buy that blouse that Jennifer Aniston’s wearing… you know the one… with the frilly… and the tight….

Erm, yes, where was I? Right: given the classical definition of interactive television as a glorified Eaton’s catalogue, I don’t believe anyone ever really used it or made money based on it. (Based on the companies, yes. Based on the technologies, no.) But one only needs to watch the tube for a short while to see a cable company pushing their new video-on-demand services, or a satellite company advertising their Interactive Program Guide software as a part of their all-digital service, to see what interactive television is today… and it’s not that far off the original premise.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last nine years I’ve worked for what’s essentially a child company of the incredibly-arrogant one he refers to, it’s that cable companies aren’t interested in anything they won’t make money on. (It’s hard enough to get them interested in things they won’t not make money on. But I digress.) Like John Young’s character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, interactive television has been declared dead again and again. Perhaps no one’s made money on interactive TV yet, but it’s being deployed and used: look around a bit, and you’ll see there’s no one standing around getting ready to whack it over the head and throw it on his cart.

Needless to say, I’ll be curious to see Bray’s evaluation of this loser against the Matrix. I agree with the rest of his losers list and the entirety of his winners list; I suspect interactive television will be a soft match at best.

I sometimes wonder if incorrect headlines are written specifically to get the hackles of people like me up, or if they’re simply ambiguous because the writer doesn’t understand the facts. Today’s example: Shared computing power finds largest prime number.

I’ve had Andrew Clover’s IE parasite detector installed on this site for quite a while. IE is notoriously susceptible to security flaws: it leaves itself open to all sorts of exploits and hacks by downloading and installing malicious software at the drop of a hat without a user’s knowledge. So in the interests of being a good net citizen–and to help debug this problem–I put it on sirens3.com a few days ago.

For the record: I have never, nor will I ever, put spyware, malware, or any other remotely shady piece of code on any website.

Today I got my first angry e-mail. The person accused me of installing a piece of spyware that I’ve never even heard of, which was actually just found by the parasite detection script. I explained, hopefully clearly, my position on spyware and that I will never be a party to its use; I haven’t received a response yet. But this negative feedback has put me in something of a moral bind: do I remove it from the site and let people who are infected go on their merry way, or do I do the ethical thing and leave it but risk having Sirens’ reputation damaged through similar misunderstandings?

Stating it like that, I think there’s only one choice.

How bad is this: I finally tracked down a problem some IE users were having with sirens3.com, and discovered that it’s caused by code I put on the site to work around other IE deficiencies.

For those who care, the problem seems to be related to using ECMAScript to traverse and modify the DOM. There are vague references to this all over the ‘net–the symptom is that IE will load a page, then pop up an error dialog reading Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://example.com. Operation aborted.–but nothing in the way of official confirmation, or even acknowledgement, of the issue by Microsoft.

There is something resembling unofficial confirmation in a Microsoft Web Team Q&A from 2001:

Although we don’t fully understand the reason behind the error you are seeing… calling setTimeout to force the document update to occur after the onreadystate event handler has exited resolves the problem. This behavior is probably because you are modifying the document from within the onreadystate event handler.