Linked List: December 22, 2009

Tuesday, 22 December 2009

Lehrer’s Rules 

Jim Lehrer’s approach to journalism. Hard to find anything to quibble about in the list.

Information Is Beautiful: Climate Change Skeptics vs. The Scientific Consensus 

Copiously researched and fairly presented.

Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’ 

Google senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg published a long memo “about the meaning of ‘open’ as it relates to the Internet, Google, and [Google’s] users.”

It’s the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever seen from Google.

Basically, he’s spewed 4,000 words to say that “open” is always good and always wins, Google is always open, therefore Google is always good and will always win. And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work, all of which things Google could not possibly be more secretive about. Because if you think about these things, you’ll see that Google isn’t open at all about certain financially lucrative areas where it has built huge technical advantages over its competitors, and that’s not possible, because Google is always open.

I really hope for Google’s sake that this horseshit artist Rosenberg is not representative of their executive ranks. Also: open is an adjective; the noun form in this context is openness.

Craig Mod’s Lumix GF1 Field Test: Video 

A follow-up to Mod’s astounding travelogue-cum-camera-review, detailing the Panasonic GF1’s video capabilities.

Auto-Buffering Video in Firefox 

Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla:

Safari and Chrome do apparently autobuffer by default, but he incorrectly says that Firefox does as well. Just to be clear: Firefox does not autobuffer by default, nor does it autoplay by default. I’m not sure how his testing led him to believe that it does, but I wrote up some examples to show that it does not.

I’m not sure how my testing led me to believe that Firefox auto-buffers by default, either. But looking at his test pages using Firefox now, it’s clear that I was wrong. Firefox honors the autobuffer attribute, unlike Safari and Chrome. I very much regret the error, and have revised the original article accordingly.