tijs.org

Logging into my electronic banking account today i noticed a press release stating that ABN AMRO now also has an online presence in Second Life. Weirdness. Is the bank desperate to be aknowledged as an online player, hip with the times?

SL seems to be more popular in the manager crowd than it is among actual people or, more fittingly, customers. When Sun announced Java was open sourced in SL they could host 60 people max in their virtual conference center, when dutch candidates for the elections flyered in SL about 10 people attended.

Lots of organisations do not seem to understand that the maximum exposure they will get on a given day in SL is very limited since the virtual space, like real space, is just that; a (3D) space with (virtual) boundaries. Unless you build a giant arena not many people can attend. Unless you build a giant arena that offers more than a bit of eye candy not many people -will- attend. And if they do you quickly run into the technical limitations of the SL servers and software.

Don’t get me wrong i think SL is a very interesting environment and phenomenon but the ease with which organisations are throwing dollars at the it makes me wonder if anyone calculated the ROI such online presences deliver compared to a good website. I guess one can always use a good excuse for a press release though…

If you were still wondering why the new release of Windows is taking so long to get to market you might want to read this chilling tale from a member of the ’start button’ program group. Yes there is such a group, and it counts eight, who worked on a single button for a year… go figure.

SOAP? The S stands for Simple, Duh!

Java is a few hours away from being open-sourced under an GPL2 license. I guess this was a long time in the coming but it is still a very significant change. It was never my favorite programming language but there is no denying that it is one of the most important, as in widely used, programming languages around.

This is probably the best theory i heard yet on why Google bought YouTube.

Normally i wouldn’t post about yet another google aquisition but this time ’round it’s sorta interesting since Jotspot is totally based on the Dojo Javascript toolkit. So did they want the wiki or the killer JS team? And does this mean Google will become a Dojo contributor?

part of screenshot current microsoft.com homepage.

* Ik kreeg bij pixmania de optie mijn bestelling via Kiala te laten bezorgen naar een sigarenwinkeltje om de hoek. Simpele doeltreffende oplossing voor het probleem van online bestellen * Ik ben apetrots op mijn vriendin Sylvia die onderzoekers en conservators blij als kinderen achterlaat na een staaltje photoshop goochelen. * Gisteravond de lokatie voor ons RoomWare project uitgecheckt en die is perfect, midden in de stad en zeeen van ruimte. Iemand nog tafels over? * Judging from this spiffy wiki RubyCocoa is finally getting some traction. Last time i looked most docs were in japanese. I wonder how this compares to the ruby system bindings in Leopard… *

Erno heeft zonet mijn bijdrage aan zijn 1 question interview serie geplaatst. Fris idee, en de verzamelde serie is een leuk kijkje in de keuken denk ik.

Oops, we did it again.

p.s.
more here, here and here