I’ve been trusting my Gmail more or less blindly, but yesterday i got an error page. A wake-up call. By coincidence, same day i read this post by Sébastien Wains on planet.grep: how to back up your gmail account systematically.
I’ve been looking at social networks a bit more closely, to use in some projects, and found some interesting resources: the microformats site is very informative. And for implementation in Rails, The Whiny Nil give some good resources.
Data news wonders if open source hype will survive the recession. The hype might not, but open source definitely will, because it’s from well before last recession. Plus their reasoning is wrong, because they assume companies pay employees to develop any old feature. While from what i see, employees paid to develop open source will develop the features their company needs, so they would have to do it one way or the other. This way they’re just building on the shoulders of giants.
With regards to data safety (and privacy) I trust all these ‘online services’ not at all.
An interesting read is Bruce Schneier’s essay: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/02/securitymatters_0221
I use rsync.net as a backup service – but I have the same data on tape and of course locally too. Online services are ‘convenient’, but they should by no means be allowed to become something you ‘rely on’ in order to function.
amen to that. I got lazy there.
At OSCON in Brussels last year I told Mr Kindermans that I quit reading Data News because of the constant stream of paid for “articles”. There’s a limited to the number of times I want to read about how wonderful this new company or service is only to never hear about it ever again. I guess Open source projects (like the one I’m heading) typically have a little bit more integrity and don’t play those games. My feeling, although I can’t prove this of-course, is that principles such as integrity, honesty and openness are much more important in open source projects compared to their closed source variants. As such, IMHO, the real question is: will Data News survive the transition to open source? That is because I think that the general consensus is that a recession will create a driver TOWARDS open source, NOT away from it.
Thanks for the link, love your blog
Matt
P.S. I preferred to reply here and not over on Datanews as I don’t want to give a Microsoft fanboy troll like Mr. Kindermans a forum.
I tend to agree with you: open source has a lot of chance to thrive during recessions.
DataNews is interesting if you know it’s biaised, and can read between the lines. But yes, overall it’s not a reliable source.
Thanks