the-reference.com

Mountain Hardwear also sent 2008/09 Stance pant, which I’ll review below. From Mountain Hardwear’s 2007/08 line we received the Edge jacket and the Synchro jacket, bib, and pant. So, consider this a retrospective and prospective Mountain Hardwear jacket and pant review.

Mountain Hardwear Edge Jacket

Other jackets have fleece liners, but this one actually proactively reaches out to the skin. Instead of feeling like a frozen tarp, which is what many hard shells feel like when they gets cold, the Hairpin felt like I was wearing a bearskin rug against my neck and cheek. (Don’t worry - no bears were harmed in our evaluations.

While I really liked Mountain Hardwear’s 2007/08 models, I will admit that I’ve found it extraordinarily difficult to peel Mountain Hardwear’s Hairpin jacket off. It is such a cool advance over anything I’ve seen in any jacket manufacturers’ 2007/08 lines that it makes me anxious to see what the other ski apparel companies are planning for 2008/09.

As you know I wear a large hinged knee brace post-ski surgeries and was concerned a medium pant would be too tight. They were a great fit after all because they flexed out well with the brace. They were soft, comfortable and warm.

Mountain Hardwear’s Stance pant is also excellent. Mountain Hardwear seems to put a premium not just on the bare necessities (waterproofing, breathability, warmth), which it provides in abundance, but also on comfort. The Stance is a great example. It’s super flexible, as evidenced by Jaime’s review:

As mentioned, I had never worn a Mountain Hardwear jacket before. I just figured Mountain Hardwear made backpacking gear, since that is the Mountain Hardwear gear that I have. But it just took our reviewers a few days of skiing to realize there is much more to the company.

I’ve never worn any Mountain Hardwear apparel before, ski jackets or otherwise. I have a tent of theirs and some other things but this was my first foray into their ski gear. I wasn’t expecting much. As is often the case, I was wrong. Blissfully wrong.

I’ve saved my review of Mountain Hardwear’s ski jackets and pants for last for a good reason. First, because the Mountain Hardwear Hairpin jacket is the best jacket I evaluated. Second, because you can’t buy it until the fall of 2008. (It’s next season’s model.)

First, the Mountain Hardwear Hairpin. I let my two-year old terror, Lily, wear it in the picture at right, but this was about the only time I was willing to part with it. It is amazingly comfortable because of an internal liner of shaggy fleece (see the pictures below). Mountain Hardwear calls it MicroClimate Zoning. I call it warm and comfortable.

Think about that. The Stance pant actually made room as Jaime pounded down through the powder (see the Alta video referenced above - Jaime is wearing a black coat and the Stance pant in that video), not holding onto the brace. It’s rare to find a touch like that in a ski pant.

Like the Mountain Hardwear Hairpin jacket. When it becomes available for sale, buy it. It’s awesome.

Mountain Hardwear Hairpin Jacket

Which brings me to the entire Mountain Hardwear Synchro line. If you’ve skied you know the difference between a hard shell (superior weather proofing but less comfortable) and a soft shell (more comfortable but not as wind/waterproof as a hard shell). Mountain Hardwear appears to be trying to turn that old distinction on its head with the Synchro line which provides the comfort of a soft shell (very soft and supple) with the weatherproofing of a hard shell.

The Mountain Hardwear Hairpin ski jacket, along with the other jackets we reviewed, has a slew of thoughtful, useful touches. Waterproof zippers and plenty of pockets, for one, including vents along both arms to allow you to cool down on the trail. The powder skirt kept absolutely every flake of snow out when we took the jacket through deep powder at Alta. Super warm. Not bulky. Lightweight. Form fitting.

Perfect. This is the sort of jacket you won’t just wear on the slopes, but will choose to wear it everywhere. (In fact, if you’ve seen me lately in the Bay Area, you will have seen me sporting the Hairpin. With style.

Mountain Hardwear Synchro Pant

Coming full circle, Mountain Hardwear has put this to good use in its Edge jacket. Like the upcoming Hairpin, the new Mountain Hardwear Edge jacket has what they call MicroClimate Zoning (same as the Hairpin above). Rather than line the entire jacket with the same material, Mountain Hardwear uses different lining material for different parts of the code, making it more lightweight, more breathable, and more tuned to the wearer’s needs. That “shaggy fleece” I mentioned above? It’s only on part of the back and neck. Right where you need it.

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It’s just one of many technological innovations that Mountain Hardwear has been developing.

Lily prefers Mountain Hardwear

Mountain Hardwear does this, in part, due to its “conduit technology.” The conduit laminate mixes hydrophilic and hydrophobic materials to push water vapor out but refuses to let it in, thus making for a very breathable, very waterproof material.

The only problem we found with the Stance pant is that it collected a few cuts in the fabric from the new Scott skis that Jaime was using at the time. The sharp edges cut it. It would be good for Mountain Hardwear to add some stronger material at the bottom of the pant to prevent this.

After three straight days of traveling to close my quarter, I needed to unwind tonight. Given that I don’t drink or smoke crack, I chose to create a video: “The Challengers of Open Source.” Cheesy title, but I had The New Pornographers’ song (”Challengers”) running through my head and
car stereo on the drive home from the airport. So be it.

I know I missed some in this video - I simply couldn’t find good photos or, if I did, they inexplicably didn’t work in the video when converted (such was the case with Nat Friedman’s that I pulled from Facebook).

What is the video “about”? Well, about some of trends guiding open source into more enterprises, but mostly about the great people I know in the open-source (mostly business) community. The best thing about open source is the exceptional crowd with which I get to run.

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Challengers of Open Source: Music video

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Mary Jo Foley notes that the more standards-compliant Internet Explorer 8 may cause some problems for website owners. Why? Well, many have tailored their websites to non-standards compliant IE7 (as well as prior versions), and may find that opening the doors to
IE8 may not be painless.

As Microsoft noted on its IE blog:

What does “getting ready for IE8″ mean for web sites? IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode - its most standards-compliant layout mode - by default. In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards interoperability. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of IE to display differently than intended. This creates a “get ready” call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in IE8.

It also creates a “get ready” call to rival browsers, and particularly Mozilla’s
Firefox, to capitalize on Microsoft’s incompatibility with itself to remind website creators that web standards are just that: Standards that should lead to greater cross-platform/browser compatibility. As more websites code for IE8, it should lead to those same sites working better with Firefox,
Safari, and other browsers.

In the past, Microsoft competitors have failed to capitalize on these moments when Microsoft gets out of sync on compatibility with its own products. For example, Office 2007 file formats are different from earlier versions of Microsoft Office. Microsoft makes a lot of noise around the importance of sticking with the standard - its own Office product - to ensure file compatibility, but compatibility between different versions of Office on different platforms and across different versions has been spotty, at best.

Yet no one really capitalized on this.

Perhaps it’s because there have been no sizable, credible competitors to Microsoft Office. The same is not true in browsers, however, where Firefox commands at least 20 percent of the global browser market. There’s a real opportunity for Firefox to take market share from Microsoft as IE7 shifts to IE8.

Watch this space.

On January 31, 2008, a video depicting hundreds of people standing perfectly still in New York’s Grand Central Station was posted on YouTube. The video quickly became a phenomenon, and to date, nearly 9.5 million people have watched it.

Why, you ask? The standing still was actually part of an elaborate prank, pulled off by “agents” of a group called Improv Everywhere. The idea was that the hundreds of people would simultaneously “freeze” in the middle of Grand Central, with no warning nor explanation to those nearby, and stay that way, no matter what, for five minutes.

In the video, you can see dozens of perplexed onlookers, confused as to what’s going on. In their midst, the participants look like statues, comic in their stationary poses. When, after five minutes, they all suddenly began to walk away and to blend back into the crowd, the onlookers broke out in applause.

At its essence, Improv Everywhere is a group of pranksters that strikes here and there, around New York and the occasional other city. In that regard, they aren’t much different from other groups that have come and gone, playing practical jokes on an unsuspecting public.

But what makes Improv Everywhere different is that it has mastered the art of documenting, with rich videos and lots of photography, their work and then disseminating the documentation to the world at large via the Internet, both on YouTube and other services, and on the group’s own Web site.

And while Improv Everywhere itself is based in New York, it has spawned what might be called a worldwide spinoff movement of people who love the idea of impromptu pranks and want to follow the group’s footsteps. The resulting network, known as Improv Everywhere Global, helps those in other cities and countries coalesce behind the notion of creating and perpetrating pranks, all in the spirit of Improv Everywhere itself.

But while the global arm has managed a few pranks, Improv Everywhere remains a New York phenomenon, the brainchild and the passion of its founder, Charlie Todd.

In 2001, Todd–who, to some, is a dead-ringer for rock star Ben Folds–found himself onstage at a West Village bar, impersonating the singer. He got a positive response from the crowd, and decided to use the experience as the jumping-off point for a new form of prank theater.

In the years since, Todd has recruited hundreds of so-called agents to help him with what he calls “missions,” the pranks Improv Everywhere runs. Among the most notable are the annual “No pants” subway rides, in which hundreds of participants show up on New York City subway
cars in their underwear; “Food Court Musical,” the group’s most recent mission, in which a number of agents materialized in a mall in Los Angeles and suddenly broke out in what, to onlookers, appeared to be an impromptu musical about several people’s simultaneous and coincidental need for napkins; and one of my favorites, in which dozens of participants dressed in blue shirts and khaki pants and flooded into a Manhattan Best Buy store, attempting to look like the store’s easily recognizable employees.

But Improv Everywhere has pulled off many other pranks as well. A visit to its Web site reveals a wide range of concepts, some quite simple and others much more complex.

So what ties them together?

“We never break character, and we never have a reveal moment at the end of the mission,” Todd told me recently. “From the beginning, we’ve been interested in the idea of doing something that’s unusual, doing something out of the ordinary, and then vanishing, leaving without taking credit or giving explanation.”

In actuality, the explanation is little more than the act itself. In the group’s videos, you can see the bewilderment on onlookers’ faces as they witness what, to many, is the oddest thing they’ve ever seen. But in most cases, when the mission is finished and the agents disappear, it’s quite obvious what’s happened, and you can see the delight on witnesses’ faces at having seen something so bizarre.

To Todd, that’s exactly the point. His goal with the various missions is to surprise an unsuspecting crowd with something they’ve never seen before and then to walk away as if nothing happened, leaving nothing but smiles in his wake.

Of course, as the missions have gotten larger and more sophisticated, the group’s need to stay below-radar and out of trouble hasn’t changed. That means that the group strives mightily to stay true to its roots, even as it works to bring the pranks to the world at large.

“One big challenge we’ve been wrestling with is riding the line between the events being pure and special for people who see it in person,” Todd said, “versus also the importance of getting awesome video footage and photographs as well.”

What that means, practically, is finding ways for the group’s cameramen and women to be discreet yet manage to be right in the middle of things.

One good example of that was when Improv Everywhere pulled off its Best Buy prank. One video camera was hidden inside a modified
Xbox 360 package so that the person shooting the video looked like a store customer thinking about buying one of the Microsoft video game consoles.

Other strategies have involved shooting video through windows and having the photographers pretend to be onlookers who just happen to have cameras.

One of the most important things in pulling off these kinds of pranks is being prepared to handle any security or law enforcement that may come along.

Even though the pranks are designed specifically to be harmless to people and property, they sometimes cross the lines of what authorities are able to deal with.

That’s why participants are told that if anyone asks what they’re doing, they should answer something along the lines of, “I’m just here to meet my girlfriend,” even when they’re dressed the same way as dozens of other people answering the same way.

Todd said that while they have had very few run-ins with the police, one of the earliest no-pants pranks did draw some angry cops to the scene.

“A cop encountered it and didn’t know how to handle it,” Todd said. “He was freaked out.”

The upshot of that event is that the cops ended up putting eight participants in handcuffs and citing them for disorderly conduct. However, he added, all eight had their tickets thrown out later “because it’s not illegal to wear (nothing but) underpants in New York City.”

The best part of that whole experience, he said, was that the police officer in charge of the scene was Officer Panton. Seriously.

But Improv Everywhere has also managed to demonstrate that its missions are meant as nothing but fun.

So, Todd said, when everyone gathered for the 2008 version of the no-pants prank, there were three police officers waiting for them. But they weren’t there to stop the event. Rather, they were there to escort them and to make sure everything went smoothly.

“Now the NYPD just knows that on a Saturday in January,” Todd said, “they have to assign some (officers) to the no-pants detail.”

Still, there are always going to be detractors, even when groups like Improv Everywhere goes out of its way to make sure its missions are done in a purely positive spirit, something Todd is proud of given that many pranksters on television strive to make fun of people in front of the whole world.

“If you’re doing something that pleases 100 percent of the population, it’s probably not very interesting,” said Todd. “Every year, after we do our no-pants mission, there will be comments on the Web site that say, ‘How dare you do this in front of children.’ My practical response is, ‘Are you going to raise your child and never take him or her to the beach?’”

One thing that makes it possible for Improv Everywhere to continue to succeed with its missions–at least in terms of finding many surprised onlookers–is that the art of so-called culture jamming, or flash mobs, is still foreign to most people.

That may change over time, however, especially because as Improv Everywhere’s popularity has grown, so too, has worldwide interest in bringing its message, well, everywhere.

That’s why Todd turned to the custom social-network service Ning to create Improv Everywhere Global, which is enabling culture jamming fans in other cities and countries to band together to create their own missions.

So, there have now been “freezes” in many other cities, and you shouldn’t be surprised to see a group of people on the subway in your city in their underpants.

But even as the Improv Everywhere Global community–there’s now more than 12,000 people signed up–gets going, the mother ship is continuing on.

Todd said that last weekend, the group carried out its latest mission and that in a couple of weeks, it will be posted to the Web site. He wouldn’t say much about what it is, except to say that it involved identical twins.

“That’s one of the (great) things about having a giant mailing list,” Todd said. “We’re able to make requests for unique types of people and to get responses. I sent out a request for identical twins and got 50 offers.”

Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a much awaited decision concerning arbitration agreements. Hall Street Associates LLC v. Mattel Inc. Full Opinion in PDF format While this case won’t grab many headlines and is unlikely to be featured on the evening news, arbitration agreements are very common in high-tech, which means that changes to this area of the law can have far reaching effects.

Arbitration clauses are popular for several reasons: (1) they dictate where a future case will be heard, (2) they remove the risks of trying the case to a jury, (3) they lessen exposure to class action lawsuits, and (4) they tend to favor businesses rather than consumers. PayPal, eBay, and many other software and on-line service providers include arbitration clauses in their standard terms of use, as do airlines, cruise ships, and outdoor arenas (though there is some question concerning the enforceablity of arbitration provisions in one-sided contracts such as software “shrink-wrap” licenses wikipedia:”shrink wrap contract”). They are also frequently used in intellectual property license agreements. But there’s a catch. The federal statute governing arbitration, the Federal Arbitration Act (”FAA”), also “makes contracts to arbitrate “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable,’ so long as their subject involves ‘commerce.’” Id. at 5. Specifically, unless you can prove the arbitration involved corruption, fraud, misconduct, exceeding authority, or evident miscalculation of the award, the courts cannot overturn an arbitration decision. See FAA Sec. 10, 11. In other words, once an arbitration decision is made, you’re stuck with it.

To make arbitration a bit more flexible, lawyers often wrote the terms of the contract to expand judicial oversight of the process. In the Hall Street case, the arbitration agreement gave the court power to change any arbitration award if the arbitration panel made a legal error, giving the disappointed party what amounts to a do-over in Federal Court. The exact wording of their agreement was as follows:

“[t]he United States District Court for the District of Oregon may enter judgment upon any award, either by confirming the award or by vacating, modifying or correcting the award. The Court shall vacate, modify or correct any award: (i) where the arbitrator’s findings of facts are not supported by substantial evidence, or (ii) where the arbitrator’s conclusions of law are erroneous.”

In other words, the parties agreed to make the binding arbitration a little less binding. Until this week, federal courts in eighteen states allowed this practice, courts in twenty-two states rejected it. Numerous organizations filed friend of the court briefs in support of one side or the other, some arguing the importance of finality in arbitrations, others predicting doom and gloom for arbitration if the courts were not allowed more oversight. Now the matter is settled. The wording of the statute governs, and parties can not obtain heightened judicial review by writing their arbitration agreement to allow it. In other words, absent a few narrow exceptions, you’re stuck with the arbitrator’s decision.

This doesn’t mean that the parties cannot protect themselves from arbitrators who ignore the law. Arbitration agreements can, and often do, include requirements that specify the rules and procedures that must be followed. My prediction is that going forward, arbitration provisions will become a bit more detailed as to the legal procedures that must be followed, giving parties and their lawyers a few more things to argue about when drafting a contract.

Hey, Mr. Music Executive: scrap your preoccupation with CD sales and start looking for ways to help people share, yes share music; focus more on developing and profiting from artists; and forget about subscription services and ad-supported music.

These are the conclusions of James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, according to a report titled “The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It,” issued on Tuesday.

That’s a fitting title because the report reads like an obituary. Tower Records, a music mecca for decades, has already closed but McQuivey argues the real deathblow to the industry will come when Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, and other large retailers begin scaling back shelf space for CDs.

“This move will permanently signal the end of the music business as it was once known,” McQuivey wrote. “From that point on, more music will be sold digitally than on CD, reducing CD sales to just $3.8 billion in 2012.”

McQuivey, a former professor at Boston University, tells record executives to cheer up because there are ways to rise from the ashes. He says first, the industry should quit fooling around with music subscriptions and ad-supported models. People want to own their music and downloads have won. Only 7 percent of adults on the Web say they have ever tried a subscription service, according to the report.

The analyst also sent a message to ad-supported music services, such as SpiralFrog and Qtrax. The ad-supported model should stay “on the radio where it belongs,” he said in his report. Social networks are better places for selling ads against music, and they also allow users to share songs virally.

McQuivey’s finding here was particularly timely. Over the weekend, PaidContent reported that MySpace is in talks with the four top labels about launching a jointly operated, ad-supported music service.

Sharing is vital, according to McQuivey, because it makes new music discovery easier, which the Web was supposed to help with but so far has tanked. In this effort, he sends a special shout out to Slacker, a personal online-radio service.

“The gold medal for 2007 (in music discovery) should have gone to Slacker,” McQuivey wrote. “(The) portable device provides instant access to radio-formatted music that can easily convert to a digital download with the click of a button. This model combines the simplicity of the radio experience with the power of music ownership.”

When it comes to artists, the labels should focus more broadly on a musician’s career, including merchandise and concerts, as well as recordings. He said it’s the artists, not the CDs that are the music industry’s true product.

In a final note, McQuivey suggests that music artists, who have historically looked down their noses at advertising, had better change. He says the industry should rip a page out of NASCAR’s playbook.

“Artists who used to pretend that their platinum album success was really about their “art” will no longer have that luxurious pretense because labels won’t sign them unless they agree to a barrage of sponsorship opportunities,” McQuivey wrote. “There will eventually come a day when Chips Ahoy will contend with the Keebler Elves over who can be the official cookie of the Taylor Swift world tour.”

Part of the Sequoia Voting Systems Web site was defaced and subsequently taken down on Thursday, according to a report in InfoWorld. As CNET prepared this blog, the entire Sequoia Voting System site was frequently inaccessible.

Last Friday, Sequoia systems contacted Felten and threatened legal action if he or his students conducted an investigation of a working New Jersey voting machine. On Monday, Felten posted the e-mail on his blog . It reads:

As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.

Last week an independent group representing New Jersey county clerks asked Princeton University computer science professor Ed Felten to investigate the discrepancies in the New Jersey vote tallies. Felten and his team have examined Sequoia and other voting systems in the past. Most recently, Felten’s team of graduate students helped the California Secretary of State Debra Bowen conduct a survey of her state’s electronic voting systems. One of those graduate students, J. Alex Halderman, recently gave a talk at Shmoocon 4 suggesting that with improvements, electronic voting systems could work well in a future election.

The Ballot Blog page on SequoiaVote.com had contained information from Sequoia regarding the Super Tuesday New Jersey election, but as of Thursday afternoon the blog site was available only on and off.

On the resurrected Ballot Blog site on Thursday, Sequoia Voting Systems announced that it had initiated its own external review of the New Jersey voting systems. The external review, the company said, would be conducted by independent parties including Kwaidan Consulting of Houston, Texas; an Election Assistance Commission (EAC)-accredited Voting System Test Lab (VSTL)–Wyle Laboratories of Huntsville, Ala., and possibly another VSTL; and an academic institution.

Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems

Dear Professors Felten and Appel:

The defacement and subsequent takedown occurred Thursday morning on the company’s Ballot Blog page. Sequoia is one of a handful of electronic voting companies used in the United States. It has in recent days come under fire for apparent discrepancies in voter tallies in last month’s New Jersey primary election.

The majority of open source vendors utilize some form of commercial licensing to distribute, or generate revenue from, open source software. Ad hoc support services are used by nearly 70% of the vendors assessed, but represent the primary revenue stream for fewer than 8% of open-source-related vendors. Most vendors generating revenue from open source software are reliant on direct sales staff to bring in the largest proportion of revenue. There is very little money being made out of open source software that doesn’t involve proprietary software and services. …the fact is there are few vendors generating revenue from open source software that are following a pure open source approach when it comes to developing all of their code in the open and licensing all of their software under open source licenses.

Such is the case with open source.

Finally, two words: cloud computing–a term I use to refer generally to running software in the network, rather than locally. Cloud computing is shaping up to be a huge consumer of open-source software.  The ease of licensing, the ability to customize, the ability to try things out quickly, and–yes–costs that tend to be lower than proprietary software, all make open source and the cloud a good fit. And cloud computing, beginning with its early consumer-oriented Web 2.0 guises, is where a lot of computing is headed over the coming years.

In short, as Matthew puts it: “Open source is a software development and/or distribution model that is enabled by a licensing tactic.” That’s a far cry from open source as social movement or belief system as predominated early on and still has its adherents today. That’s not to say that open-source proponents ever fit neatly into a single mold; Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was always more the pragmatist than the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman, for example. However, in the main, we’ve clearly shifted to a locale where even those who are predisposed to “Software Freedom” as a concept are more willing than in the past to treat open source as just one mechanism among several to develop and distribute software.

In my view, there are a variety of reasons for this change including the following:

Most of the time, changes in the technology landscape happen gradually. Sometimes we can look back and pick out some inflection point–though, in my experience, such are more about storytelling convenience than anything more concrete. However, at least as often, things just evolve until one day we’ve clearly arrived in a different place.

Richard Stallman, among other open-source purists, has decried this shift because he sees it as a move back to proprietary, centralized computing.  There are some legitimate concerns about data portability, privacy, and other user rights in a cloud context. However, to narrowly and uncompromisingly focus on open source’s historical roots and structure in a cloud-based world is to both tilt at windmills and re-fight a different war with the weapons and tactics of the last one. Pragmatism isn’t necessarily compromise; it’s adapting to the world as it is, not as you wish it would be.

Business models have had time to play out. At the same time, it’s also proven to be the case that, building a sustainable and scalable business around a pure open-source play tends not to work. Many open-source companies have gone down the sell-support-for-the-open-source-bits path. The problem is that not enough customers buy up to the pay version. Thus, companies whose product is built around an open-source project have increasingly moved towards offering proprietary plug-in modules, hosted services, and things of that nature. (MySQL, now part of Sun, being just one example.)

Matthew Aslett touches on several aspects of this shift in his post: “Open source is not a business model.” (His alternative title: “freedom of speech won’t feed my children.”) His conclusions (from a recent 451 Group report) include the following:

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It’s gone from being an outsider movement to an integral component of the computer industry mainstream. However, more specifically, it’s clearly entered a phase in which pragmatism, rather than idealism, is the reigning ethos.

Open source has, in a sense, won. By which I mean that it’s entered the mainstream and has, to no small degree, heavily influenced how companies do development, engage with user and developer communities, and provide access to their products. Furthermore, the well-established success of many open-source projects (Linux, Apache, Samba… the list is long) makes many of the long-ago barbs thrown at open source (insecure, risky, unsupported, etc.) risible in today’s world. Open-source advocates no longer need to jumpstart a software revolution. They can afford to be pragmatic.

And open source has “won” because it’s proven to be a good model for development and collaboration in many cases. A lot of the fervor around open-source licensing debates was effectively predicated on a belief that open source had to be protected from those who would strip mine it for commercial ends and kill it in the process. However, today there are plenty of examples of open-source projects that use BSD-ish, anything goes licenses–yet are hugely successful. There remain a variety of implications to using different license types, but we’re once again talking more about practical matters than philosophical ones. Few major software companies (including Microsoft) don’t intersect with open source to at least some degree.

If you use the RealPlayer on Internet Explorer, watch out. Researcher Elazar Broad has posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list a so-called heap overflow vulnerability that makes it possible for an attacker to modify heap blocks after they are freed and overwrite certain registers. This could allow code execution on a compromised machine. The vulnerability affects all versions of RealPlayer running under Internet Explorer.

To avoid the loss of functionality, security experts recommend using RealPlayer in a browser that doesn’t support ActiveX, such as Mozilla Firefox (for Windows and Mac).

Exploit code for this flaw has not yet been made public.

Without a patch from RealPlayer, security experts recommend disabling the killbit for the following ActiveX ClassIDs:

2F542A2E-EDC9-4BF7-8CB1-87C9919F7F93
CFCDAA03-8BE4-11CF-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA
Please note that disabling the killbits above will also remove some functionality within the player.

Bendtner didn’t play and that’s fine with me. His arrogance is starting to wear on me (and, apparently, on the other players). He’s a good player but needs to learn his place. This is what led to his bust-up with Adebayor. He’s still the junior man on the totem pole and needs to remember that. It was nice to see him warm up and then sit the bench. He needs that lesson in humility.

(Credit:
BBC)

After Arsenal’s blistering defeat to Tottenham last week, I figured it would be a test of their mettle to see how they responded against Newcastle, which put up a good fight against Arsenal earlier in the season. Despite a slow start, Arsenal has clearly moved on.

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As for Eduardo…what can I say? He is turning out to be an exceptionally astute signing by Wenger. His first bending ball into the post set up Adebayor’s goal. The only surprising thing about his play today is that he didn’t score in his typical slow-motion/time-stops-while-he-slots-the-ball-home signature moves.

I would have liked to have seen Fabregas and Walcott score, as neither has been confident in front of goal. Walcott played reasonably well today but couldn’t get rid of the ball fast enough when he was anywhere near the goal. Very disappointing.

Diaby played better, and Senderos was good enough. Adebayor…? He played very well and is starting to earn my confidence, though I really would have liked to have seen him pass the ball to Eduardo on his second goal. Yes, he ended up putting it in, but Eduardo was clear to his right before Adebayor shimmied his way over to the right before taking the shot.

All in all, not a great display by the Gunners but a good enough response to their defeat at the Spurs’ hands. My one big dilemma is whether to cheer for Manchester United or Tottenham tomorrow. I’d like to see Tottenham get put back in its place, but I’m also aware that beating Tottenham will be easy compared to beating Manchester United should they meet up later in the competition. Decisions, decisions.