I'd like to announce that I'm starting a new business, it's a revolutionary concept and this is the first time I'm talking about it in a public space.

It's gonna be called Go Goats and basically what it is is you go online(the site will go live soon) and you pick the goat you need to rent, there will be a wide selection of utility and sedan goats. We stuff it into a a big crate and ship it directly to your door step. Or anywhere you'll be in the world. When it arrives you'll find a fresh goat inside with some goat fuel, a.k.a. carrots and cabbages, and packing material. You pay by the day and when you're done you can either leave it at the airport or call our automatic goat returns network which within 15 minutes will send an apache helicopter with a suspended crate direct to your location, all you have to do is usher the goat in and shut the door.

That's it!

Once unpacked you just climb on the goat and it'll chauffeur you around town. It's gonna be the next big thing in green transportation. The manufacturing process has far less environmental impact than electric cars today. You also get better mileage and will be able to customize your goat with a bevy of features including "Cup Holders" for those thirsty trips, "Velvet" where we drape the goat in velvet for a more comfortable feel and "Nitro" which is where we lace the goat's carrots with coffee. Another big benefit and what of course will be a standard feature is that as you drive around town your goat will recycle the world around you, everything from aluminum cans to cigarette butts.

You'll be able to sit atop your goat with pride and your friends will envy you, but they won't have to because of the low low prices we're aming for. Focus groups have already indicated that it's gonna be a big hit and we're striving to meet your needs and if we really knock this one out of the park we'll make available a set of leasing plans and move into the owner's market.

Opera filed an anti-trust complaint against Microsoft saying they abuse their operating system's dominance by bundling Internet Explorer, the average user just uses Internet Explorer and never even tries Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or any of the other alternatives. Well It's official now, there will be a special version of Windows 7 available in the European Union that doesn't come with the infamous Internet Explorer browser. Over the last 6 months Microsoft has lost 5% of the browser market to Firefox, and only 5%  went from IE 7 to IE 8. There are quite a few people who still use IE 6 that are due for a new pc, and the people dying to upgrade their OS that recently got stuck with Vista will be getting Windows 7. Microsoft will lose the vast majority of its browser share in the European Union. In the rest of the world Google still has plans to trump Microsoft in OEM deals to package Chrome instead of IE with new PCs, but even if they don't more than 90% of internet users use Google for search, when Google starts seriously pushing Chrome, Internet Explorer will be obliterated. Currently half the users upgrading from IE go to Firefox, when Chrome actually enters the arena it'll surely scoop up even more. From what I've seen there are a lot more IE users asking me questions about Chrome than Firefox users. With the surge of computer sales that Windows 7 is gonna generate and Chrome betas just recently being released for Mac and Linux it looks like the race is revving up. Microsoft is leaving out native email and productivity apps for simply tying in their windows live service with the operating system. They're doing that to release sooner and beat Google to the punch. In the same vain Microsoft just launched Bing, what some say is their final attempt at competing with Google for search. Word on the internet street is people try Bing, check the search results with Google and then go back to Google. That doesn't say much about the quality, it's not about quality, it's about trust and familiarity. Google = Search. With YouTube, Gmail, Translate, and soon Google Wave Google is at the center of the vast majority of web diets. Still, Microsoft is pushing Bing really hard trying to grab a few %s market share, trying to grab some of the search market as it directly ties into browser market. Things are gonna get interesting,

I expect the w3c schools browser market share breakdown to see IE drop below 10% over the next year(by July 2010) to Firefox and Chrome where Safari and IE will be about even. As for the general population every website has different statistics for browser shares some show IE has 90% others show 60% and still others show less than 5%. So it's hard to use any of that as a measure, but IE is going to take a significant hit. With all these percentages though it's easy to loose sight of the fact that they represent more than 1.5 billion people currently on the internet, a number that grows by about 10 million new users every month.

Tracemonkey is a new addition to Firefox and it'll be in 3.5. What it does is compile Javascript into machine code, which speeds up Javascript remarkably. Now I recently tried Safari 4 and was blown away by how fast it was in the Javascript department. Well head over to http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/tracemonkey-demo/ and test the image rendering demo in Safari 4 compared to the current Firefox(3) and the video demo of the latest Firefox(3.5) soon to be released.

Firefox 3: ~1.2 seconds

Safari 4: ~0.3 seconds

Firefox 3.5: ~0.1 seconds

Up till now Adobe flash was faster than Javascript in the browser because Flash/Actionscript is compiled into bytecode. Bytecode is fast and is run in the flash virtual machine. Mozilla and Adobe have been collaborating on a project called Tamarin, and working toward the next version of Ecmascript, the standard both Actionscript and Javascript implement, one of the products of that collaboration aside from both technologies being able to compile into machine code(a language-set interpreted natively by the hardware) is Tracemonkey.

The good news is because All the major players are contributing to Tamarin and because it's gonna be open source. All major browsers will have it implemented in the near future. It also means that Flex/AIR apps will run faster, and that all the major players including Microsoft(what!?  :D) are intending to implement open standards. One step closer to a MUCH faster web, where you choose a browser based on features, and not whether or not your favourite site is broken in the others. Which will mean much more innovation in browser features and possibly spawning off into browser only OSs. Then again maybe it'll stop somewhere around Jolicloud http://www.jolicloud.com/

Chrome for mac and linux is also out, but it's like an alpha so there's nothing to say about it.

Safari 4 is FAST. I've been playing with the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 for about a week or two now, personas are really great and obviously I can't live without things like, session manager, Firebug, yslow, live http headers, and most importantly the Awesome Bar. But Safari 4 is so FAST. Fast as in, the Javascript on a page, even a really intense page is almost instantly interpreted and run, and the structure of the page is rendered long before images even begin to load.. over broadband.. I usually find Safari frustrating to use because you can't search from the Address bar like every other browser can. Firefox has the Awesome Bar, which among other things typing in keywords or sentences uses Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search, on Safari doing that you get an error. The debug, html/css/javascript/network monitoring tools in Safari weren't as interactive as Firebug, although they are much improved now and visually much more appealing. On top of that there's a bunch of developer extras in Safari like the Activity Monitor, the ability to change the user agent which let you impersonate other browsers (a valuable feature that Opera actually implemented years ago). You can disable various aspects of a page like cache, images, scripts, etc. easily, Debugging and Profiling Javascript built in which I guess is standard now, and the web inspector supports monitoring and debugging new stuff in html 5 like html databases.

Now that it's finally using the new Webkit builds it fully passes the Acid 3 test. Also the latest trend in browsers (started by Google Chrome) is individual threads for tabs, Firefox is implementing it in their latest beta and Safari 4 too has mechanisms for protecting other tabs from that one rogue site that burns a hole in your cpozone. Safari looks a lot better than it did in betas visually, especially when you peel tabs off a window to create a new window or do the reverse. Another cool thing about Safari on Mac is web clips. You can clip out a part of a website and stick it in the dashboard where that clips stays live. And the new top sites page gives you live previews of your favourite and most visited sites like Google Chrome and a number of Firefox plugins, and being able to search across all the text of all the web pages in my history and scroll through the history or search results in coverflow is a nice touch too.

Above everything else Safari's brute speed over any other browser out there makes me want to use it, so I went looking for some plugins to make the experience as usable as Firefox. I realize that the new Firefox is coming out soon and will be much faster than the beta but Safari is just so fast.

The first plugin is Inquisitor, super enhanced search. The latest version is even better than what I remember, and it looks like they have an iphone app and plugins for Firefox and IE. Check out Inquisitor http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php

The second plugin is, well there are a bunch that let you search from the address bar, but none support Safari 4 yet, soo.. what do I do now? I guess I'll just wait for the Firefox 3.5 RC to hit next week, rumoured to be ~250% faster than it was and put it in the same league as Chrome and Safari 4. Here's hoping. Actually go check out Mozilla's 'Show us your speed' campaign http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fastest/ .

A brief history of our impact on this island in the universe. It's awing. Remarkable. Yet because it seems to say everything it leaves me wanting to do.

Watch the movie at the YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

Watch Yann Arthus-Bertrand announce the film at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/yann_arthus_bertrand_captures_fragile_earth_in_wide_angle.html

As a developer I'm familiar with staying up for 30 hours at a time, I've been known to go up to a week without sleep or longer surviving on short naps. I recognize that sometimes things look like a good idea in that state and I try not to make those statements and realizations public until I have a chance to review it in the light of full consciousness.

Reading the latest post on the Daily Motion blog [link] I'm left with the tangible warm feeling you get when you see someone else in that state of mind. DailyMotion.com for anyone that doesn't know is an alternative to YouTube. Now don't get me wrong there's a steep drop off there but they are nevertheless an alternative.

The  spec for the next version of HTML calls for a <video> tag. It means that instead of using flash to load video, or some other plugin like DivX, you can just embed the video on your website like an image and have it play natively in the browser. This requires that browsers implement the HTML 5 specification. There are a number of issues with adopting the <video> tag at this stage before any browsers even support it.

Let's face it, even though the majority of developers no longer user Internet Explorer,  and ALL of them consider it a scornful misadventure in market dominance, the majority of users still use it. With Windows 7 potentially being functional (While screenshots and beta testers are raving about it, I'm still sceptical as Vista received the same acclaim pre-release), and while Google is positioning Chrome to take a hefty piece of the pie, albeit slowly, Microsoft will still hold a significant slice themselves. Microsoft has made clear their devotion to implementing HTML 5 standards in IE8 but they haven't even started those yet and IE8 is out and available for download. They will only implement it in one scenario. That is if they find a way for it to leverage their position in the online space(not likely). It's not likely both because the <video> tag will be open source it literally means implementing it in IE8,9, or 10 would be giving up their proprietary leverage, and they're clearly interested in proprietary leverage with Silverlight(Microsoft's version of Flash). Microsoft doesn't give a shit about open standards or advancing the web and they'll continue to exploit their market share for as long as possible if it means holding onto their dominance. After all, we are reaching a point where the average user can be satisfied with linux, and once that happens Microsoft will have to actually be better than the competition to remain a player in the online space. They are definitely not going to accelerate that process.

Also to be noted is the quality of video that can be played with the <video> tag. It's simple, at this stage, the quality and formats are complete and utter shit. Jittery low-fi shit. In an age of broadband where YouTube just added an HD button Daily Motion just made a move in favour of open source technology that hasn't been implemented anywhere except a few betas. Sure if they don't need to use flash they probably don't need to use FMS and can switch to lighter cheaper hardware. Going completely open source like that will save them a lot on proprietary software. It's insane to make the switch now. In the middle of what is likely or at least close to the climax of the browser wars the guys over at DailyMotion are all idealistic walking around with peace symbols around their necks claiming that they want to implement the constitution which is not even in it's first draft and there's 4 countries that appose that very constitution and they're all armed with a full nuclear arsenal.

And the same goes for the HTML spec for canvas. Both Microsoft and Adobe stand to lose if video and canvas are implemented in Internet Explorer, but even if it was implemented tomorrow, Adobe is leaps ahead of where the open source alternatives are especially with their desktop and server products AIR and FMS and the popular flv format.

The moral?

Make critical business and tech decisions after a full nights rest. DailyMotion... you can't be fucking serious...

I don't need to explain who Tom Green is cause if you're reading this you should know. He innovated tv and he did it pretty early in his life. He created a new genre and he's doing it again. Well wait, he's been doing it again for a while now, but he's crossing a crucial barrier. Moving from original video content on the web sponsored by the same institutions as traditional television to semi-subscription based, supported by the fans, by the audience. He's hacking away at the final chains of traditional media that'll open up the internet and proving the subscription based audience supported model works. We've seen similar audience supported concepts work like Keith and The Girl however Keith and Chemda created a platform; The shows are all free, fans support the show buying merch, stand up cds, etc.. This is different. The significance of which is staggering. Here you pay for access to the library of content. In the KATG model a listener may never buy any merch and a fan on Keith's comedy or Chemda's music may never listen to the show. What Tom is doing is creating a direct cause and effect relationship where the content is the product as apposed to being a platform. This is crucial now due to the massive cost difference in offering audio vs. offering video. While storage and bandwidth costs will come down in the future you just couldn't support video as a platform. Now with the audience deciding the value of the content you only have to please them, it allows the freedom to create; as Tom says it'll "let the artists be artists" and not have to sanitize their work to please a corporate agenda.

This is a message from Tom on the subject:

HEY GANG! :)

May 25, 2009

I am up and eating a delicious pickle. A strange thing to eat for breakfast I am learning. I think pickles are definitely more of a lunch thing. I am excited about this day, this week, and this year. I think I came to some pretty good conclusions about the website here over the weekend. I really want to thank all of our members. Your continued and growing support of The Channel is really helping the creative process. We have been doing this LIVE broadcasting here at the channel for a few short years now, but the membership service is very new. Only about 2 months old. And I can say already that it is a great success. It is becoming easier to focus on shooting and goofing off frankly, now that we have control over our own destiny around here.

See the past 2 years I have essentially been making deals with broadcasters, syndicators, websites, and sponsors. And I really have to say, it has been a real hassle. Not to say that I don't believe in the old model, I do. But it has definitely taken away from the creative process. There always seemed to be too many cooks in the kitchen. And this was on a WEB SHOW!! Can you imagine how picked to death television shows get? See, so this is what we are creating here. A much more liberated and free place to make TV. And I can say, as more members sign up, the more fun and easy it is for us to produce funny shit. I don't have to worry all day anymore!

Honestly, that is what making comedy on TV amounts to sometime. Arguing about what funny is? It never really made any sense to me at all. I always felt that the networks, when producing a comedy show, should just let the artists be artists, the comics be comics, and the broadcasters broadcast.. But they don't. They more often than not insist that they be at the center of creative decisions. They apply demographics and research to the writing process. It becomes far to clinical, and sanitized. And ultimately everything on TV ends up being kind of the same. You know? Like it was all painted with the exact same brush. And that sucks. So this is why I love what we are doing here together and I really thank you for the support.

Today I am going to go hit the streets again and film something ridiculous. Whatever pops in to my head. Just because we can. I will post it tomorrow. Thanks gang!

I will be going LIVE from my living room tonight for a bit. Sign up for our Skype team and I may give you a call on video phone. It'll be good to see ya.

Tom

I thought I'd stop by Facebook this morning(ok it's 1:00pm and I just woke up and happened to go there now-ish, but I was totally working on something cool till early this actual morning[6:40am], so for all intents and purposes this right now is 'morning' for the rest of the post.) and saw they'd updated their Terms of Use now deemed 'Statement of Rights and Responsibilities' which alone probably set at ease at least 30% of its outraged users. For the most part it's the same as before except now they've closed a whole lot of legal loopholes that their lawyers didn't see originally, specifically the stuff that made the contract completely null and void by virtue of being contradictory and unenforcable, and the language has been revised to be 90% not shady, and in the shady spots to be convoluted enough to throw off an estimated combined further 45% of disgruntled current and former users. After that there's an estimated 20% that has to use Facebook for work or networking and does so cautiously and then the again estimated, 5% that realizes they couldn't take the social network giant in a legal battle, and that they could easily change their TOS by a few words to something like "By maintaining a membership you give us lifelong irrevokable consent to use and ownership of your content to do with it as  we please including all your intellectual works you've posted on or may post in the future on Facebook or stashed away in your basement" oh wait, they already tried to do that. I meant do something like that again.

So with that said, what are the goods and bads about the new Facebook TOS (a.k.a. [long pandoring name])?

Pros

• It's now legally enforceable and valid - a pro cause all the protection they claim to provide, they now actually mean it and are legally obligated to enforce it. With an invalid document as they had prior they could do ANYTHING with voluntarily submitted content, including identity, by virtue of it being invalid.
• They now have to give 3-7 days notification when they change the TOS, which will allow users the chance to get out at the very least for one TOS revision, more if in that revision they don't choose to change that very statement, in which case you get at least one more use out of the clause.

Cons

• It's now legally enforceable and valid - even though they had carte blanche with your identity, content, and intellectual property with their old invalid agreement, some local laws trumped such behavior. Now that you're signing a valid contract by using their service, the shady things they stipulate are now their legal right.
• Their ownership of your intellectual property, personal information, and identity(name, address, phone number, pictures of you, etc.) is total and unlimited. ANYTHING you post on Facebook belongs to Facebook until you delete it or close your account. The excerpt below may be confusing,  it doesn't give Facebook the right to use anything you post anywhere on Facebook, instead it gives Facebook the right to use anything you post on Facebook or anywhere else on the net in connection with Facebook(and increasing amount of sites including CNN and other big players, there is no stipulation how loose a connection it needs to be) anywhere in The Universe(incl. France, Mars, Texas, TV, Magazines, Patent office, Jive Records, Radio, etc.). While you have some control over their ownership of your content via privacy and application settings there is nothing in the TOS that stipulates Facebook has to give you the ability to control all aspects of their ownership rights. Furthermore there's no stipulation that you need to be notified when they remove or change the wording of privacy and application controls. In fact, there are no Intellectual Property controls mentioned.
  "For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it)."

So what to make of this? Is Facebook less or more shady now? Here's my survival guide for the current TOS:

1. Use Facebook every day. In some cases(when it involves money, and/or you've written an application for Facebook) you only get 3 days warning of TOS changes and knowing Facebook's past stance on the permanancy of their rights you don't want to be stuck in that mess. You also need time to say goodbye to your 'friends', once you delete your account, any goodbye message will be hidden from other users; snatched from their inboxes.
2. Don't put anything on Facebook or any site that uses 'Facebook Connect' or is in any other way connected with facebook that you don't want to share equal ownership of with Facebook [and any of it's employees acting in the name of Facebook],  including but not limited to your name, likeness, image, identity, video footage of you or your family, art, poetry, music, or any other creative content. It's worth mentioning again that they can do anything with such content anywhere, for and to anyone.
3. If you have to put personal information up, you know, so people know who you are and so you can interact with them, make sure to double check your privacy settings. Keep a note that all the privacy settings that were there yesterday are still there today, because they can change whenever Facebook pleases without notice of any kind. Hope Facebook gives you controls over how THEY can use your content rather than just what type of friends and other users can view your content.

To reiterate and conclude: fuck facebook, they are at par ethically with people that author malicious viruses and data harvesters. I hope Zuckerberg get's analy raped by big donkey dick and/or if the site should EVER manage to turn a profit for him to turn around and support cancer research or something good that balances out the shameless exploitation of his sheep-like mindless users.

today i'll tie my shoe lace
in a knot but not a bow
a complex net work of order
that order two and fro.
that material ending in plastic
for threading through my shoe,
comes in little aid
when frayed; adieu
adieu i leave this wretched place
was ok for tying two shoes
that's it

into it i climb and nestle
the body of my car.
down i put my new tied shoe
I'll test its mettle far
where the rubber meets the road in a different kind of shoe
one round and rubber and black and bolted to the metallics of my car
the four of them turn two and fro
first front, then back will surely follow

if i were to keep a spare shoe in my trunk
it would only slow me down
not my car my car's the opposite
if i were a car i'd frown
but it's always standing, standing on
it's tired little rounded feet
flying 80 miles an hour
down the fricken street.

BANG a duck, i've smashed in too
before i hit the wall
i noticed some yellow, some fluff, and white and you
it's stuck against a mall

to crash is actually quite a shock
the duck i'm sure agrees
besides the duck, i'm stuck as well
i'm buckled at the knees

my legs are turned up in side out
they're pointing at the face
accusing me of some foul act that
i can almost taste

i don't see my shoes no more
no duck no car no wall
down the road along the edge
oh no oh my i'll fall

quickly move to safety
in the middle of the street
exactly where a speeding truck
lifts me off my feet

swiftly to the air i flew
embodying the duck
who still remains against the wall
he isn't in the truck

out the truck the driver dove
he tucked and braced and rolled
his head he did not quite protect
and now he's but a fold

still flying through the air i knew
a truck i'm in it's path
it swerved left and rolled right up over itself
any one could do the math

BANG i'm stuck, almost taboo
a sandwhich with the ground
from now on it's all i'll be
lights out, lights down, a frown