For both providers and customers of cloud technology, these are exciting times, and yet, in the midst of all of the energy and confusion that the cloud inspires, I can’t help but think that we’ve been here before. I see remarkable similarities between today’s adoption cycle of cloud technologies and the adoption of the Internet as a useful and essential tool.

Fifteen years ago, a similar industry conversation unfolded around how the World Wide Web could transform business — and really, society as a whole — as we then knew it. As commercialization of the web was getting under way, the idea that a new paradigm could really change the way technology was used and information was managed was met with both curiosity and skepticism. Much of the discussion centered around all the perceived barriers to widespread adoption of web technology, such as security, enterprise IT integration and technology lock-in vs. open standards.

Those of us who were a part of the technology industry back then as either vendors or customers can recall the volume and fervor that marked such debates. Industry analysts — along with much of the mainstream press — continued for quite some time to promote those aforementioned barriers as reasons why the transition to web- or distributed computing-based architectures would or could not be fulfilled. By the end of 1995, however, customers and vendors alike had begun to embrace the ideas and technologies of the web, fueling perhaps the largest economic expansion the technology business has ever seen, one that continues today.

Over the last two years, technology developers, businesses, industry analysts, press and vendors have begun to discuss the transition to cloud technologies. Just like in the early days of the commercialization of the Internet, both the benefits and barriers to such a transition are being hotly debated. Similarly, we now stand at a tipping point at which mainstream enterprises are seeing the value and vendors are offering services that deliver measurable business value, integrate into existing IT environments easily and address the common concerns around privacy, security, integrity, performance and availability. Widespread adoption, in other words, is already underway.

Granted, the industry doesn’t have all the solutions yet. But the solutions we do have and the valuable benefits they can provide to the enterprise IT buyer today are simply too compelling to ignore. With history as our guide those businesses that focus and commit on solving their challenges via these new services stand to reap the greatest financial, operational and competitive benefits of this technology transition.

It’s encouraging to see so many technology luminaries participating in healthy exchanges as the industry navigates this new era. My hope is that the conversation turns quickly from a discussion of “if” cloud technologies like storage and compute will become the norm for enterprises to one of “when” — and more interestingly, “how” the dramatic potential of the cloud can best be fulfilled. Indeed, another era of technology based innovation, adoption and economic prosperity has already started –- and it may just turn out to be even more compelling than the last one.

Jeff Treuhaft is the CEO and co-founder of Zetta Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage solutions.

A new venture is taking place in Dublin. Dub Hub a flexible working space for start-ups, social entrepreneurs and creative businesses to come together to share ideas, experiences and resources, to participate in and build a new way of thinking about working.

I’ve heard about these kind of places and I think it’s great to see one being set up in Ireland. The Dublin Hub is a flexible, affordable, shared working environment for freelancers, small businesses, the self-employed, and home-workers looking for a desk, or a meeting space in town. Members book time in the Hub in advance – similar to buying mobile phone credit – they have the freedom to choose when to work and are charged solely for the time they spend in the Hub.

“We hope to attract inventive, innovative, socially committed, ethical and environmentally aware people, people who need to take their ideas out of the garden shed or away from the kitchen table. We aim to provide a vibrant, dynamic, collaborative, exciting atmosphere, a place people will want to be in and be part of. We think this is an essential response to the challenges posed by changing work patterns in the new century”

If you’re interested they are having a meet up July 14th at 7pm at the Science Gallery in TCD. Looking forward  to this hopefully it takes off.

We give a huge bunch of user support at #xubuntu. After each release, there’s a peak for the need of user support. Here’s some of the most asked questions after the Xubuntu 9.04 release.

See http://xubuntu.org/get and http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/9.04/release/.

No.

Not directly. You can first install the xubuntu-desktop meta-package and remove your (K)Ubuntu related packages following the instructions at http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purexfce. Now you are on a Xubuntu 8.10 system, and can upgrade to Xubuntu 9.04 normally.

You most possibly have too little resources. Try the alternative CD.

Desktop uses a graphic installer and works as a live CD. You can try it before installing. Alternate uses a text based installer and you don’t get to try it first, but it also uses less memory for installing.

No. The major difference is the Desktop Environment used; Xubuntu uses Xfce while Ubuntu uses Gnome. However Xubuntu and Ubuntu use the same repositories and base system. Minor differences include different sets of default applications and settings.

You have to use the alternate CD if you want ext4.

You have to install all updates first. If it still doesn’t show up, see Settings > Repositories > Updates from Synaptic and set “Show new distirbution releases” to “Normal releases”.

No.

Press Alt+F2 and run xfce4-panel. See also https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XubuntuPanels.

Press Alt+F2 and run xfdesktop.

No, it doesn’t.

Yes you can. Try adding the XfApplet applet to your panel.

The installer might not have detected your graphics card correctly. Try using a restricted driver.

See Applications > System > Hardware Drivers.

Open the Keyboard settings (Applications > Settings > Keyboard) and open the Application Shortcuts tab. Click add and follow the shortcut wizard. The shortcut commands are amixer sset Master 5%- for volume down, amixer sset Master 5%+ for volume up and mute for mute.

Pulseaudio just doesn’t work for everybody. You can try if uninstalling it helps; sudo apt-get remove –purge pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio in Terminal or remove both packages from Synaptic.

It’s not installed by default, but you can install it from the repositories – just install the package openoffice.org.

Refer to my previous blog article on Getting Support.

• On 32-bit Linux, with newer versions of libmpg123 than my Debian-running laptop happens to have, the compile-time choice of large file support breaks binary compatibility with the libmpg123 library, wreaking havoc with the FFI bindings. Specifically, if large file support is enabled, a number of symbols change names, e.g., mpg123_open becomes mpg123_open_64. This is irritating and not how I'd have done it (for instance, I don't think the version number of the shared library changes to indicate the break in compatibility), but I could've easily worked around it in mpg123-ffi by detecting which version is present at the time the library is initialized. I very nearly did so, were it not for the following problem:
• 
  
• On 32-bit Linux, due to the desire to have properly aligned data when using SSE instructions, recent versions of GCC provide support for aligning stack frames along larger boundaries, such as 16 bytes. The mpg123 developers seem to take this support as sufficient justification to ignore the platform ABI, introducing dubious stack alignment checks at every entry point to the library. This is not something I know how to work around from the CFFI binding in a reasonable fashion, so for the time being I've given up on adapting to such hostile versions of the library. Fortunately, I've absorbed enough trivia eavesdropping on the SBCL hackers on IRC to know that Darwin uses 16 byte alignment for precisely the same reason, so SBCL must support it, and after a few minutes searching I hacked the align-stack-pointer macro in SBCL's x86 backend to enable the 16 byte alignment on Linux as well, which appears to work around the problem (at the cost of my build environment getting even stranger). I also rebuilt the libmpg123 library with --disable-largefile and, just to be thorough, --disable-aligncheck, and set my CFLAGS to -mstackrealign, two measures which I think should've sufficed to solve the issue even without a hacked SBCL.
• 
  The 32-bit Linux/x86 binary now includes a rebuilt version of libmpg123, renamed libmixalot-mpg123, with these changes. The 64-bit binary doesn't have any of these problems, and should Just Work, but you have to provide your own libmpg123 as before. My mistake, of course, was using libmpg123, but I wasn't aware of libmad when I made that choice, and I'm not enthusiastic about rewriting otherwise perfectly working code on account of these issues (although I probably will, sooner or later). My current binaries, in conjunction with Shuffletron 0.0.3 (featuring various minor improvements), should be free of these problems, but still haven't been as widely tested as I'd like. The lesson to me, obvious in retrospect, is to test these things on a more diverse set of configurations than my own machines (particularly when they all run the same release of Debian), even when it seems so simple that nothing could go wrong.
  
  

This article describes how to use Portal Pack plugins to create and modify Sun GlassFish Web Space Server/Liferay themes on NetBeans IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

• Open Innovation, or is Business War?

  The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.” Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation becomes reduced to quick-money recipes.

  tags: openinnovation, intelectualproperty, innovation

  • Here is the obvious conclusion that Chesbrough is unwilling to draw from his own theory: if intellectual property moves around in an economy through the clumsy and cumbersome process of trade, things get drastically slowed down. The solution isn’t just more trade. It is faster trade, and sometimes, free sharing.

• Enterprise 2.0 SaaS: Customer Benefit or Vendor Convenience?

  However, SaaS is not an optimal solution for every business problem and every customer. Providers need to look in the mirror and be brutally honest with themselves about the motivations around their SaaS strategy and its relevancy to the customer. I’ve already heard of instances of business changing hands between E2.0 vendors at this early stage in the game, for these very reasons.

  tags: Saas, onpremise, vendors, businessproblems

• Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural

  It is much easier to use product managers to create a repeatable process. After all, there is much less passion involved. For many markets, it may not be worth Apple-style design. People often wonder for Enteprise software whether it matters, for example. But I don’t buy my PM friend’s argument. Talent of all kinds is always scarce. A decision to eschew finding talent for a repeatable process creates mediocrity.

  tags: productmanagement, productdesign, culture, microsoft, process, repeatableprocess, userexperience

• Reinventing Silos

  Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.

  tags: silos, content, formats, enterprise2.0

  • Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog” and “Wiki” as two separate options for navigation.
  • Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.

• Notes from Enterprise 2.0: Still looking for End User Adoption

  What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:

  tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, problems, businessprocess

  • Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve
  • Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool.
  • Embedding the tool within areas that the information workers live.

• Connecting ideas with communities - Annotated

  I use the chasm model to explain my professional work of 1) seeing what is ready to cross the chasm by 2) staying connected to the innovators & being an early adopter so that 3) I can help mainstream organizations. It’s a good graphic summary of my consulting practice.

  tags: innovation, ideas, chasm, communities, connectors, mavens, salesmen

• Adopt Intranet 2.0 or risk failure

  An organization without a 2.0 strategy risks being left behind, or outright failure (though death may be slow). Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.

  561 organizations of all sizes from across the planet participated in the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

  Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in the Western World.

  Intranet blogs, wikis and discussion forums are quite pervasive, while other less common tools such as podcasts and mashups remain an after-thought at most organizations:

  tags: enterprise2.0, intranet2.0, adoption, survey, costs

• Management 2.0 : quel rôle pour le management de proximité dans les organisations collaboratives

  Ce sujet n’est pas neutre, ces managers vont être les principaux relais dans la mise en place de communautés ou de plateforme collaborative dans votre organisation. Les avoir contre vous, c’est la garantie de l’échec de votre projet. Maintenant, il ne faut pas se leurrer, dans une organisation collaborative, le rôle traditionnel de ce management va évoluer, il ne peut pas demeurer le même. Comme le disait Peter Drucker : “90% de ce que nous nommons le management consiste à compliquer le travail des collaborateurs. Dans un nouveau monde de management, je vois l’employé gérer sa charge de travail et demander un soutien à un coach quand il en a besoin”. Ce n’est pas sans rappeler le fonctionnement d’une entreprise collaborative.

  tags: middlemanagement, collaboration, management, personalbranding, proximitymanagement, management2.0

• Death of the middle managers: thinking of Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture Change

  They were not responsible for giving reports work to do. Instead a resource pool operated with resourcing managers identifying staff with the right skills mix to quickly staff-up and tear down projects. Consultants had to proactively go about managing their career, promoting themselves and finding their next job.

  This, I believe will become the new model of the corporation in a Web 2.0 world. And the fact of the matter is this model exists today in many consulting firms.

  tags: enterprise2.0, middlemanagement, management, consulting, resources, resourcingmanagers

• Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 2.

  Internal communities contain members who are employees of a company. They are paid and can be fired. The panelists touched upon many issues and gave excellent advice.

  tags: communities, internalcommunities, communitymanagement, silos, customers, employees, communication

• Productivity in a Networked Era – Assessing ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)

  Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

  The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

  The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

  tags: networks, socialnetworks, ROI, organization, productivity, ROII, interactions, judgment

  • ROI is an accounting and financial management concept businesses use to decide where to make investments and to assess the success of investment decisions after the fact. ROI reduces both return — R, what you expect back — and investment — I, what you expect to put in to numbers — making it possible to compare one investment opportunity to another. The numbers tie back to categories on the balance sheet and income statement, (i.e. tangible assets and hard-dollar returns).
  • Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude intangibles from their ROI calculations. Several purported authorities on calculating ROI suggest taking intangibles into account by putting them on a list but refusing to estimate their value. This leads you to comparing numbers to words, apples to oranges. 
  • Executives manage immeasurable things all the time. The more powerful the executive, the more likely he or she is involved in effectiveness — doing the right things rather than doing things right. Intuition, judgment and gut feelings guide these more important decisions. Qualitative assessment often can make up for a concrete numeric result.

• Collaborative Enterprise: Enterprise 2.0 & The Flywheel

  My triggering point for this post was a post by Peter Bergman in the Harvard Business blogs on the best way to change corporate culture. It is in many ways a recapitulation of fundamental issues organizations face on the cultural side. He says: “Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities. In most organizations these elements develop unconsciously and organically to create a system that, while not always ideal, works.”

  What all of this really boils down is two things - human and social capital. Toyota in my view could be one such company - the robust and high performance knowledge sharing network they have built across their supply chain is a case in point. See research paper here .

  tags: enterprise2.0, toyota, knowledgesharing, humancapital, socialcapital, collaboration, lean

  • “Toyota’s network has solved three fundamental dilemmas with regard to knowledge sharing by devising methods to (1) motivate members to participate and openly share valuable knowledge (while preventing undesirable spillovers to competitors), (2) prevent free riders, and (3) reduce the costs associated with finding and accessing different types of valuable knowledge
  • Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.”
  • Could Toyota have done this better with E2.0 technologies? Looks like it would have helped them accelerate this journey but then it would have been possible only because they had a strong cultural and business foundation.

• The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management

  Community managers are human and imperfect. Here are the Seven Deadly Sins that community managers are sometimes guilty of:

  tags: communities, sins, communitymanagement

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• No related posts.

Sounds, movies, and pictures can be extracted from the Myst IV demo, too. Revelator can also extract the player's in-game snapshots and journal entries from saved game files.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 7.0.1: Made some small usability improvements.
REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.3 or later, Java Runtime Environment 1.4, Myst IV: Revelation.
DEVELOPERRon Hayter
DOWNLOADS1907
DOWNLOAD NOW (727 K)
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Improved some of the extracted pictures from Myst for iPhone and iPod touch. Improved extraction of pictures from The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time. Made some small usability improvements.
REQUIREMENTS Java Runtime Environment 1.4 or later, Myst, realMYST, Riven, or Myst III: Exile.
DEVELOPERRon Hayter
DOWNLOADS2849
DOWNLOAD NOW (1 MB)
More information

Some of the Firefox’s popularity can be attributed to the number of add-ons available to pimp the browser. Google Chrome doesn’t have a stable extensions capability yet but it is possible to install extensions, only thing is you need to run developer builds of Google Chrome browser. Developers are building extensions to the Google Chrome browser, although there are only handful of extensions at this time, if the extension support is well built into the Google Chrome browser then I am sure we will see valuable extensions to the platform.

You need to download Google Chrome Developer build for the extensions to work.

After installing the developer build right click the Chrome shortcut and click properties. After chrome.exe add this –enable-extensions

chrome.exe –enable-extensions

Now go to the extensions page and download the extensions and install them.

For any reason if you don’t like or don’t use the extensions you can uninstall them easily.

Enter chrome://extensions to the address bar you will see the list of installed extensions with uninstall buttons. Click on the uninstall button to uninstall any extension with ease.

Firefox delicious extension is one of the popular and quite useful extension. Now the Delicious team has released the extension for Google Chrome, the extension is a light version which allows you to post bookmarks from Google Chrome to Delicious. It adds a bookmarks button to chrome omni-bar (address bar). Using the button you can bookmark stuff to delicious, you can also use Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut to bookmark. Download Delicious Chome Extension

Download Google Chrome Dev Builds Check out sample extensions.

Advertisement: Novell: Open Enterprise Server vs. Windows Server “Upgrade or Migrate” Business Case. Your proposal to migrate to a new server has been approved. But wait, which server environment do you select?

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Related Articles at Technology Bites:

• Google Chrome May Get Extensions By May
• Google Toolbar for Firefox Adds Chrome’s New Tab Feature
• Chromifox: Google Chrome Style for Firefox 3
• FoxGLove: Portable Firefox with Google Apps
• Create, Restore and Backup Your Google Chrome Profiles

Google Chrome Extensions | Technology Bites

It's 75 years since Bradford-born JB Priestley wrote his classic English Journey, a snapshot of his travels around the country chronicling the thoughts of ordinary people. What did it mean to be English? We revisit Bradford - a city transformed by mass immigration, but cited in a recent survey for its essential 'Englishness' - and ask what that means today

There is a dead man standing in the centre of Bradford. He stands perfectly still, his flowing overcoat blown back by the wind, clasping a pipe in his hand as his stone-cold eyes appraise the city that stretches out before him. Men and women hurry past him, occasionally turning to glance in his direction, but he does not move. His name is John Boynton Priestley and he was born in 1894 and died in 1984, 12 years before this statue was unveiled. JB Priestley was many things - a prolific novelist, essayist and playwright - and his most influential work was a book published exactly 75 years ago. It was called English Journey and it was subtitled "a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933". Priestley travelled across England, from Southampton to Birmingham, Leicester to Lancashire and from Bradford to Norfolk recording the England he saw.

In capturing and describing England and its people, usually ignored in literature of its kind, English Journey influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation. It spawned the Mass-Observation and Documentary movements, provided the inspiration for George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and helped formulate a public consensus that led to the formation of the welfare state. The book is a vividly drawn portrait of an England still reeling from the first world war and anticipating the second; it is also a country that has yet to absorb the effects of Commonwealth immigration or the full impact of globalisation on its culture. The England of 1933 may seem a world away but Priestley wrestles with a question that could hardly be more contemporary: what does it mean to be English? And that is why I am here in Bradford on an overcast Friday afternoon staring up at the statue of Priestley. I am here to see how this city has changed since Priestley's day and to explore what Englishness looks like today. I am on another English journey in another England.

A blue plaque on a three-storey house built from pale yellow Yorkshire sandstone. Martial hip-hop beats blare from the top-floor sash window as a woman in a pink shalwar kameez follows a man with a snowy beard down the sloping road. This is the house where JB Priestley was born, Saltburn Place, a mile from the city centre and in his day home to the lower middle class but not far from working-class housing, mills and factories. His father was a teacher and the young Jack attended Bradford grammar school but left at 16 to work as a clerk in a wool merchant's office, before joining the army in 1914. He never settled back in the city again. In English Journey Priestley is both warm and cool towards Bradford. "It is a city entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly," he notes but he also recalls that it was "at once one of the most provincial and yet one of the most cosmopolitan of English provincial cities".

Bradford had long been a cosmopolitan city with Flemish weavers, German wool merchants, Irish navvies and eastern European refugees. But the influx of immigrants from the subcontinent has been of a different magnitude and has had a greater consequence. According to the last census, 17% of the city's population is Asian, the vast proportion from Pakistan. Walking around the city, past the sari stores and Indian restaurants and jewellery shops I could see how Bradford has earned its nicknames of "Little Pakistan", "Bradistan" and so on. It is a huge change in a comparatively short time and it is why Bradford has been a city where the question of English identity has been most fiercely contested, and one which has regularly attracted writers searching for the heart of Englishness.

"The England admired throughout the world is the England that keeps open house," Priestley wrote. "History shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained." By the time Beryl Bainbridge retraced Priestley's journey for a BBC series and book 50 years later the city was home to Pakistani immigrants who had begun arriving since the early 60s. Bainbridge found that Priestley's optimistic vision of cosmopolitan Bradford had given way to discontent, as unemployment among the Asian population exceeded 50%, and an increasingly confident community agitating on issues such as single-sex schools. In 1986 Hanif Kureishi visited Bradford for an issue of Granta magazine devoted to travel writing. He had come "because Bradford seemed a microcosm of a larger British society that was struggling to find a sense of itself, even as it was undergoing radical change".

Elsie and Percy are sitting at a wooden table. She is 85 and he is 89 and they have spent the last three years at the Elderthorpe residential home. Percy has throat cancer so mostly communicates in gestures. The couple have spent their whole lives in Bradford, leaving school at 14 to work as weavers in the textile mills. During the war Percy joined the Black Watch and his wife helped build the bombs that defeated the Germans. "I remember dressing up in our Sunday best with rouge and a two-piece," she says, "and going promenading after dinner. We were dressed to kill, we were." She laughs.

"For my dad, being English was about being a patriot," says Charles, their son who is visiting from Australia, where he has lived for the past 40 years. "It meant empire and the monarchy and it was about being part of a big family and a strength in families that you don't find today." I ask Elsie how Bradford had changed. "You don't feel like it's our town like you used to," she says diffidently. "It has a different feel to it." Different how, I ask. "It's not Bradford like I knew it," she explains. "It has been taken over by Asians."

"You can't get English food any more," says Pat, who works at the home. "No meat and potato pie, no pie and peas and black pudding. Even the good old English pub has gone." Reduced to words on a page, such sentiments may make Elsie and Pat seem reactionary, possibly racist, but I am sure they are not. When I ask if it is possible to be Asian and English, both are certain that it is. "If you're born here you're English," says Pat. "What I don't understand is why the Asians who have been born here want to fly the Pakistan flag? They're English."

But what does it mean to be English and who gets to call themselves English? "Priestley argued in favour of a civic rather than ethnic idea of Englishness," Ken Smith tells me. He is former chairman of the JB Priestley Society and I meet him in a large room at the University of Bradford that stores the Priestley archive. "Priestley assumed that anyone who came here would buy into certain things - Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on," Smith says. To be English was to live in England: it was about sharing a set of assumptions, batting for the same side. "He had not envisaged that there would be people who would look beyond these shores for their identity," says Smith, "and he would have had great difficulty grappling with the notion that some people's identity would be bound up in religion."

"This is the spot," says Husman Khan. "This is where I was with the rest of them." Khan is 41 with a neat beard and wearing a sensible beige jacket. I am standing with him outside Bradford magistrates court in the shadow of the town hall where, 20 years ago, Khan was among the young Bradford Muslims who gathered to burn copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. "I was well caught up in it," he says. "We were being told about the book in the mosques so I was in the mob chanting with the others - we used coathangers and broomsticks to make sure we didn't burn ourselves when we were doing it."

The controversy that engulfed the publication of The Satanic Verses was the start of a new chapter in the conversation about what it means to be English. That conversation is going on still, and Bradford has continued to be at its centre: it was here that young Muslims rioted in the summer of 2001 and when the BBC aired its White Season last year - which examined the impact on the English white working class of immigration - they located two of their programmes in the city. The prevailing mood of that series was one of loss, a sense that as the children of immigrants have become more confident so the indigenous peoples have lost their confidence in all the things that made them proud to be English.

I say goodbye to Khan and head north of the city centre to nearby Saltaire, an industrial model village built by the Victorian philanthropist Titus Salt to house his employees. Walking past the neat terraced streets, I reach the grounds of Saltaire Cricket Club. Formed in 1869 it is unique in encouraging racially mixed teams. Cricket in Bradford is a metaphor for the divided city: communities living apart, playing in separate leagues with all-white and all-Pakistani teams. Saltaire is different. "We actively hold out our hand to different communities," explains chairman Ed Duguid. "We recruit from an area that has the highest proportion of Asians in the whole of Britain but we also have white players on the team."

On the pitch the junior team is warming up for the match. Joe Hicks is 18 and keeps wicket. He went to sixth form at Bradford grammar, the same school as JB Priestley, and has been playing here for eight years. "There is a different atmosphere here than at other clubs," he tells me. "It's mixed so we don't have the drinking atmosphere that there is in white clubs, and also the banter is different." I ask him if playing in a racially mixed team has made him more tolerant. "I have white friends who will say things that are a bit stereotypical and ignorant because they don't know any Asians," he says. "Like if a student is at private school people will say his parents only got the money through drugs or something but because I know how hard Asian parents work for their children I can correct my mates." What does Englishness mean to you, I ask. There is a long pause. "I don't really know," he says. "I can't think of anything ... I'm not sure." Everyone, it seems, from the Muslims to the Scots to the Welsh to the Jews know who they are, except the English.

I leave Joe and his fellow team members and head back into the city centre. The metropolitan district of Bradford takes in surrounding farmland, dales and the moors. This countryside and the small towns that fringe Bradford are where the whites who have fled the city now live. It is a world of teashops and brass bands and morris dancing societies. There was some surprise this year when Bradford was declared by a St George's Day study as one of the three most English places in the country, but it was this "greater" Bradford, that the study was describing, not the actual city.

I return to the city itself and meet John Baxendale, who has written a book about JB Priestley's England. I want to know if it is true that things were more settled in Priestley's time and that our common sense of Englishness is unravelling. "We tend to romanticise the past and pretend everyone was united back then," he told me. "In fact when you look at the 30s, England was hugely divided - this was the time of the General Strike, England losing its Victorian self-confidence, the shadow of the Great War and the Depression and the threat from Hitler in Germany and Oswald Mosley in this country." Englishness always seems to be more simple in retrospect and deeply vulnerable in the present. That vulnerability, exploited in the past by Mosley's Blackshirts, helped the BNP win a seat in the European parliament for the constituency that includes Bradford. JB Priestley was living in Bradford before mass immigration from the subcontinent but his words on the threat from the far right are eerily prescient. He wrote: "Behind all the new movements of this age - nationalistic, fascistic, communistic - has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small-town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger."

Gerry Sutcliffe is the local Labour MP and his constituency has two BNP councillors. "I think what you're seeing is that the white working class feel challenged by their environment and are looking to lash out," he tells me, "plus the BNP has changed their image and send young women out knocking doors rather than men." Sutcliffe tells me that in the past those who had voted BNP would not look him in the eye on the doorstep but now they will confidently say that they have done it.

My time in Bradford is drawing to an end. What I have found is a more complicated picture than I had expected. The city did feel divided and I can see why some whites could feel that much of Bradford more closely resembles Pakistan than England and are turning to extremist parties. And yet digging deeper I also found signs of hope in places like Saltaire Cricket Club. Things were rarely quite what they appeared. Ed, the chairman of the cricket club, was white but adamant he was not English since he had spent the first seven years of his life in Scotland. Meanwhile his friend Anil had been born in India but said that he felt utterly English. And then there was Husman Khan. He was the one who had been in the throng burning copies of The Satanic Verses, but not long after the book-burning Khan met a girl -a white girl from Halifax, whom he married and with whom he has four children. I met his 16-year-old daughter, Najda, her head covered in a headscarf that she had bought, she told me, "in a hippie clothing shop". She belongs to a generation whose identity is as much about the music on their digital devices as the heritage of their parents. What does Englishness mean to you, I ask. "It's about being prim and proper," suggests Najda. "You either laugh or cry and the English laugh at it all."

Khan himself views his fiery youth with regrets. "When I look back at how I was 20 years ago I was wrong," he told me. "I didn't know anything. I now realise I have a history in this country: I am English." And is it just because you were born here that you think you're English? "Well, I'm a member of the National Trust and we like going on holiday to Scarborough, if that means anything," he laughs. Khan now believes he has a stake in the inheritance Priestley wrote about. It seems quite a journey, from burning books to visiting Scarborough - how had Husman become English? The answer, I think, is that he has become middle class. "The true definition of a middle class is that it bridges extremes," Jim Greenhalf, author of a book on the history of Bradford, had told me. "I see the burgeoning of an Asian middle class and it is there that the aspirations, energy and enthusiasm for change and tolerance lies." There is, of course, a rich working-class English history, of brass bands and working men's clubs, but that history is more excluding and appears on the decline - not because of immigration, but due to the glittering temptations of the modern day. The middle class may not be the saviours of Englishness but, at the very least, they help strengthen it.

Englishness, I concluded as I prepared to leave Bradford, is not really about a thing - the countryside, the city, the pub or the cricket ground - and it is not about Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters. Being English is about behaving and feeling and responding in ways that are quintessentially English. During my curry with members of Saltaire Cricket Club one evening, we discussed what it meant to be English. But it was only when Anil began complaining that most Asians were too lazy to have proper gardens and that his Slovakian tenants were ruining his garden - "They start fires on my lawn!" - that we hit upon what being English means.

I began my journey standing by the statue of JB Priestley wondering what he would have made of his city and country. Coming to Bradford it is easy to be blinded by the changes and to believe that England today is an utterly different country than in Priestley's day. But Englishness is more resilient than we suspect, changing out of all recognition and yet remaining the same. As I walked to the train station I saw a young black girl with her arms around a white boy. Minutes later I saw an Asian girl, in a short summer skirt and body-hugging T-shirt, holding hands with her white boyfriend. There is a dead man standing in the centre of Bradford guarding the past as all around him the young are busy writing the future.

1894 Born 13 September in Bradford.
1914-1919 Serves in the first world war; matriculates at Cambridge after.
1922 Settles in London and establishes himself as a critic and commentator.
1925-28 Publishes early critical writings, including The English Comic Characters and The English Novel
1929 Novel The Good Companions brings national success.
1932 Play Dangerous Corner is produced in London.
1934 An English Journey published.
1940 Presents Postscripts on radio.
1946-47 Play An Inspector Calls opens.
1958 Founder member CND.
1977 Awarded Order of Merit.
1984 Dies 14 August.
Ollie Brock

• JB Priestley
• British identity and society
• Immigration and asylum

Or to put it in another way… my 5 minutes of troll-ism.

I attended the keynotes this morning at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. The first one, by Robert Lefkowitz, was the most impressive/informative/entertaining of them in my opinion. “A gentleman would use liberal software.”, what a terrific punch-line to sum up his talk! I like that *g* The keynote by Walter Bender on the sugar interface was also very good. Sorry Quim, I missed your keynote.

I’m not writing this here to praise the good keynotes or to apologize. I’ve had and have an issue with Richard Stallman’s keynote. Just to make this clear, I do not have an issue with him as a person - I don’t know him, thus I’m unwilling to judge him - he appears to be funny though (if by accident or deliberately I leave open for the readers to decide by themselves). More specifically I have an objection with his view on the danger C# opposes to the (GNOME) desktop.

Question: Why is a free implementation of C# and its runtime- and execution environment and supporting libraries worse then C++ (and its standard template libraries that goes with it), which was also initially invented and developed at big “evil” company (AT&T) by Bjarne Stroustrup?

I don’t see a fundamental difference. He says that C# is to be avoided where C++ is to accepted/recommended (speaking within the scope of potential legal strings attached, not talking about language features). Why is this also different to Java? It is just a language with free implementations of its framework (compiler, runtime-environment, libraries).

Sadly I became aware of this question only after the QA session with him. I should have asked him directly on the spot. I invite everybody (also Richard Stallman, should he happen to come across this very blog post) to help me answer this question… either via comments or via eMail.

Thanks in advance for your time and (thoughtful) input!

Time is a commodity that every single one of us needs to manage and keep track of. You get a little complacent and it will slip through your fingers. It’s always nice to know where you are spending your time so you can manage yourself better, or perhaps you may need it to create invoices for your work. Whatever the reason, if you are on Linux, you are in luck because there is a simple yet powerful application to do all this for you - Hamster.

Hamster is available as an applet for the Gnome desktop environment and you can install it using your distributions package manager. It is most likely in there (or else you can install from source). Ubuntu users may sudo apt-get install hamster-applet. Once installed, you can add it to any of your panels by right-clicking on the panel choosing Add to Panel and then look for Time Tracker (not Hamster).

Hamster will appear as “No Activity 00:00″ in your panel. Click on it, key in what you are doing and it gets down to the mundane work of counting how much time you spent in that activity. It also displays how much time you have spent in the current activity in the current session while inconspicuously adding them all together in the background to create reports for you.

Hamster lets you categorize and add description to your activities. This is especially useful if for instance, you want to view how much time you are spending on a “Complete Project” which itself is made up of sub-tasks or sub-projects. You just have to include @ when letting Hamster know what you are doing and it will automatically create a category and file your task under it!

Letting a program know what you are doing every time you are about to switch an activity might seem like too much burden if you are not into time tracking. So Hamster provides you a leeway, allowing you to enter activities that you’ve done in the past. Why would you want to do that? You will realize in a minute when we move to the reports.

Click on the applet, expand “Today” and you will see what you have been up to on that day. Click on Show Overview and you will be greeted by pretty graphs and detailed statistics of what you have been doing this week, this month or this day. You can then click the “Generate Report” button and up pops your browser with a detailed report of your activities for the said period.

Overall, Hamster is an easy-to-use and intuitive time tracking application. Everything is just in place in the interface just as you might expect it to be. It is all the more useful if you are disciplined in its use or else, you can always go back in time and make entries (for a change). Did I mention the “Stop Tracking” button, just in case you feel the need!

If you’re new on MakeUseOf, make sure to download our hugely popular productivity manual. Nothing comlicated, only the simple tips that are easy to follow and actually work.

Do you use any time tracking applications? Which software or web applications do you prefer?

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The GNOME developers, through Lucas Rocha, have announced early this morning in a press release that the last maintenance release of the popular GNOME 2.26 desktop environment is now available for download.

Tonight the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was opened with a party sponsored by Kubuntu's very own Canonical. Stickers, t-shirts and beer were all given out to contributors and users of KDE, Gnome and any other free software environment. Some converts were made from the local Canary island population who were enthused by the spirit of freedom.

Conversation ranged from the essential cross desktop collaboration issues to the question of whether it ever rains in Las Palmas.

More photos on Flickr.

read more

Getting the most out of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen requires a steady hand, a keen eye, and the ass muscles of an Olympic athlete.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an action adventure game based on the movie of the same name, telling the story of the return of Megatron and the rise of an even more diabolical enemy from the dawn of time. After a sub-par product from Traveller's Tales for the first film, Activision handed over development duties for the sequel to California-based Luxoflux, the team behind the video game adaptation of Kung Fu Panda. While the new developer brings much to the table, including robust multiplayer on top of the required single player mode, certain aspects of the game are a real pain in the ass.

Let's tense up and roll out!

Loved
Big, Beautiful Bots: No matter what my opinion might be on the Michael Bay-bots versus the more traditional designs, I have to admit that Luxoflux has done an admirable job of recreating the movie machines for the video game adaptation. The developer knows this, kicking off every mission with a crane shot of your character so you can appreciate all the work that went into creating him before the firefight begins.

Heavy Metal Combat: Revenge of the Fallen does an admirable job of depicting giant-robot-on-giant-robot combat. Bullets, missiles, and fists all pack a seriously satisfying punch, and each robot has a different set of ranged weapons and special abilities than makes going back through missions with different characters to try and top your score a worthwhile endeavor. The combat may not be perfect, but it works for me.

Pimping Your Rides: An upgrade system allows you to convert Energon based on how well you complete your mission objectives into power enhancements for your entire team. The selection of upgrade choices is a bit strange – you can power up your melee damage but not your ranged, for instance – but the system does allow for the player to tweak their abilities based on how they prefer to play.

Massive and Multiplayer: Many licensed games are developed with single player in mind, tacking on a multiplayer component at the last minute to add to the feature listing on the back of the box. It feels as if Luxoflux reversed that trend, creating an enjoyable multiplayer experience and then adding the story mode as an afterthought. The multiplayer mode contains more characters (with more on the way in the form of DLC) and quite frankly more excitement than the single player experience. Sure, you'll have to deal with listening to a bunch of early teen boys cussing up a storm...I guess that really isn't that much different than any other online console game.

Unlockables: Despite the fact that I already own all of them on DVD, the unlockable episodes of the original television series may have contributed somewhat to the relative lateness of this review. Just saying.

Hated
Triggered Transformation: Luxoflux has managed to take the one aspect of the Transformers that every other Transformers game has gotten right, and do it wrong. Press a button, and you're a car. Easy, right? Instead, the developers map transforming to the right trigger. Squeeze the trigger and you are a vehicle, with the amount of pressure you apply affecting your speed. Release the trigger and you are a robot. It's the mechanical equivalent of clenching your ass cheeks, and while the special moves you can perform when popping out of vehicle mode can make the release somewhat enjoyable, all in all it's just embarrassing.

We'll Call Them Vehicle Physics: Revenge of the Fallen plays fast and loose with its vehicle physics. Ground-based vehicles aren't so bad, with physics akin to your more arcadey racing games. Flying vehicles, on the other hand, are simply sad. Planes bounce off buildings in comical fashion, and maneuverability is quite limited, with even the simplest of aerial maneuvers out of reach thanks to the simplistic controls. Perhaps it is a matter of game play balance, but car should never be able to keep pace with a jet. An airplane moving at 60 miles per hour is an airplane on the ground.

Welcome To Dullsville: I suppose if I our planet actually did have giant robots doing battle in the streets on a regular basis, we'd probably pack up all of our interesting scenery and leave town as well. While the robots in Revenge of the Fallen look spectacular, the environments simply feel like a collection of random structures with different skins on them, which I suppose is what they are. There's just no real character to the setting.

The Story Unfolding: I somehow managed to avoid seeing the film before playing the game, which might be why the story feels like a disjointed series of occurrences rather than a full, compelling narrative. Balancing telling the tale of the game while trying not to delve to deeply into the plot of a film is a tricky maneuver, and one Luxoflux didn't manage to pull off gracefully.

Required Missions: Sam has been whisked away to a far off land where he could be in great danger! We should rescue him, but first, we need to clear the Decepticons out of one particular area, because we haven't unlocked the rescuing Sam mission yet. Unlocking missions in Revenge of the Fallen requires that you complete a certain number of missions previously, which leads to telling your best human buddy to cool his jets while you rescue generic power plant A and B from the enemy.

Of all of the failings of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the transformation feature is the most damning. It's the main focus of the property, and it deserves to be done correctly. Perhaps my main issue is that you can't simply transform and then pan around the vehicle, admiring the details. Instead, triggering a transformation also triggers movement, so you never get the chance. Instead of alternate modes, they are simply travel forms that disappear when they come to a stop. Call me crazy, but I'd just prefer a Transformers game where I can press a button once and BAM - I'm a Camaro.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an odd title that manages to succeed in categories that licensed games generally fail, while floundering in areas that should have been easy to get right. It's a movie tie-in that excels at multiplayer yet flails where the actual story is concerned. I'd use the term ass-backwards, but those muscles need a little rest.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was developed by Luxoflux and published by Activision for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 23rd. Different versions from different developers exist for the Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, and PC. Retails for $59.99 USD. Reviewed the Xbox 360 version. Played through Autobot and Decepticon story modes to completion, and played multiple multiplayer matches across all game types.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

While the world is still figuring out this new method of collaboration, we’d like to salute a few of those fearless, bleeding-edge teams that went out and made the mistakes, so no one else had to...full disclosure, I’m passionate about crowdsourcing. I’ve spent the last three years at Cambrian House, talking to people about what they do and how crowdsourcing might help them.
 
Launch a brand collaboration campaign without being prepared for what people think of you

“Yeah, let’s try this whole crowdsourcing, user-generated content thing! Sounds like people really go for it.” It’s all fun and games, until a big, ol’ SUV comes to the party. Chevy Tahoe provided video clips and soundtracks to consumers to remix, edit and add text for a commercial. Turns out, consumers think the Tahoe is a gas-guzzling, environment ruining, Republican.

Be prepared for disagreement with your brand, but start with the right purpose. “Tell us why you love us” might have been a better starting point for Chevy.

Don’t plan for the unexpected

Ok, so this ends up being kind of funny. NASA asked the public to name the next ISS module....and Stephen Colbert got his viewers to vote for his name. Are you calling out to the right crowd? Asking the general public something is a great idea, but is it really crowdsourcing if one person manipulates the way an entire group votes? No, unfortunately, it isn’t. Qualifying the people you are asking to participate is just as important as asking them to participate.

This doesn’t mean eliminating negative feedback, Dell, for example, asked customers what they wanted and got a loud, “no Windows” in reply. Dell now ships computers with Linux, much to the appreciation of consumers.

Assume work to happen for free

LinkedIn recently asked its users to translate the site for a “badge of honour,” annoying professional translators. The thing is, if you are asking someone to do something for free, you are telling them what they normally get paid to do has no value. Not a great way to get on people’s Christmas card list.

On the other hand, BT Ieas (no link - it is an internal program) asks its employees for thoughts on saving the business money or making it more revenue. If they implement an idea the employee gets a percent of the money saved/gained. Cause hey – ideas aren’t free.
 
Expect that a utopian collectivist community to emerge

Yeah, I get it, don’t throw stones...When Cambrian House originally started, we thought we could match "founding teams" to crowdsourced ideas. That’s a little too much accountability for anyone to take on after hours when it isn’t their idea to begin with.

What does work? Involving people with passion at a level they are comfortable with. Through three years of trial, error and discovery we’ve honed in on four areas that crowdsourcing plays really well with: brand collaboration, market prediction, product innovation and research discovery.
 
Assume people care

Bottom line: People are busy.  Is this going to improve their life? If you don’t provide the proper incentive, it just won’t fly. As with everything else on the internet, just getting people to notice is most of the battle. The key to all of successful crowdsourcing is feeding a need that isn’t currently being met.

Crowdsourcing done well can solve seemingly insurmountable challenges, bring you closer to your brand and get stuff done. Hope this gives you a bit more insight.

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Blizzard, Microsoft Game Studios and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Volition Programmer
"Volition, Inc., a video game development studio in Champaign, IL, is seeking experienced C/C++ programmers to work on games for the Xbox 360 & PS3. Volition is one of THQ’s premier internal game development studios. We are the creators of such franchises as Saints Row, Red Faction, and the Descent/Freespace series."

2K Sports: UI Artist
"At 2K Sports our goal is simple: Make AAA games that are the best in the genre and have fun doing it. 2K Sports is proudly developing the critically acclaimed NHL 2K and MLB 2K series of games. Owned by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), 2K Games is a successful, stable company that produces high-quality titles every year."

Harmonix Music Systems: Senior Producer
"Harmonix is seeking an experienced Senior Producer for a large, internally-developed project. We are looking for a creative, flexible, and resourceful project driver who will understand the vision for the game and distill it into a sensible, prioritized schedule, ensuring both title quality and timely delivery."

Microsoft Game Studios: Senior Level Designer
"No Strings or Controllers Attached. Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience."

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

Tencent Boston: Environment Artist
"We are looking for outstanding individuals with passion, talent and a team focused mindset. We are located in the Boston area and offer competitive salaries, superb benefits and profit sharing. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a great new development studio, a studio that can produce top tier quality games and bring them to market worldwide."

Blizzard Entertainment: Software Engineer, Tools
"Blizzard Entertainment's corporate applications team is currently looking for an experienced software engineer to join our corporate applications engineering team. This person will design and develop internal applications that aid the company and our players. The ideal candidate is a .NET expert, has successfully delivered robust solutions that can handle high-load situations, and isn't scared of ambiguity or tight deadlines."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.