DISQUS

You think?

If Russia invaded Georgia to secure its oil assets, how soon before they start looking at large wind installations hungrily?

Same here Loic, Twhirl now needs to support OpenID login

Zoli - thanks for updating the post.

Charlie, with all due respect, I think you are wrong. That may have been the case five years ago but the world has moved on. Thousands of companies now trust some of their most sensitive information to hosted applications like Salesforce.com, Freshbooks, MyRMA.net, etc.

Even Microsoft realises this and is now starting to port their applications to online - hence their hosted Exchange, hosted CRM and Windows Live offerings.

Even environmentally, it makes more sense to use online applications (remember carbon taxes and carbon accounting are only a few years off).

Setting up applications on your own servers is the way of the past.

Zoli,

As a significant number of people read blog posts in RSS readers (thereby missing the comments) I would appreciate if you would update your post with my explanations )specifically my reasons for not using hosted Confluence and for not chosing DekiWiki).

Thanks,

Tom

Zoli,

thanks for the link.

To answer some of your questions:
Hosted Confluence is NOT available under the community license. As this was for a not-for-profit a community license was all we could go for. PBWiki and SocialText had no such restrictions.
I tried out DekiWiki but the lack of an ability to create Groups ruled it out quickly.
I realise it was a long post but the wiki is for an organisation with multiple committees and sub-committees, not for a conference. We used it to organise one of the organisations conferences last year. This year we intend to use a wiki to run the organisation, not just the conference.
WetPaint was also looked into and ruled out because of the inability to keep your wikis private.

If I didn't go into detail on DekiWiki, it was at the end of a long post in which I had gone into considerable detail on the other 3 wikis. I didn't have much more to add about DekiWiki, so I didn't go into detail on it (and anyway I didn't want to write the War and Peace of wiki reviews!).

Sorry this post didn't live up to your expectations.

Joh,

I think you misunderstood Zoli's point. It was Ed Bott who said Apple were wrong - just look at Windows Update as the shining example of how to do things right.

Zoli and I, when we finally stopped laughing at such a ridiculous assertion, both pointed out that Microsoft are just as culpable as Apple in their update practices.

Both are wrong to use opt-in and Ed makes himself look silly by trying to grab the moral highground on this one.

To my mind, Microsoft's best strategy here would be to build an Office Lite in SilverLight, which saves to the cloud, has rich formatting, and allows multiple editors like Google Docs.

Microsoft currently own the office space but Google are starting to eat into their marketshare.

If Microsoft had a good offering in this space, with their brand and marketing reach they would quickly own it. They should have a freemium model on it with basic functionality free, and more advanced for $25 p.a., for instance.

Mark, I'd expect no less from Shai Agassi!

Robert, at the DLD conference earlier this year, Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP, unvelied his plan to get Israel completely off oil for transportation within the next 10 years.

It involves electric cars which will be manufactured by Renault/Nissan. The difference with these cars is that you can swap out the battery.

So, when your battery starts to run down, you go to a battery swap station (all gas stations in Israel will become battery swap stations), and swap for a fully charged battery. No downtime waiting for your battery to charge.

This model is fully transportable to other countries. Check out the video explanation at http://www.tomrafteryit.net/shai-agassis-better...

Aw, nice one, thanks Paul. That looks a lot better.

One request, can you drop a couple of paragraph breaks into my first comment too?

Cheers

As a complete aside, commenting on this site with Firefox keeps my paragraph spacing, comments left above in Safari lose all paragraph info!

Thought you should know.

By the way, I outed the Blueface CEO for lying on my blog.

If he had any proof that he wasn't lying, data privacy laws or no, I'd be receiving a takedown notice quicker than you can say "liar, liar pants on fire!"

In this case, yes, it would be refreshing to get an honest response from the CEO!!!His every comment contained some lie, personal insult or blatantly false allegation.

As I said previously, this only reflected poorly on himself personally and the Blueface brand which he represents, as well.

There are many, far more appropriate responses he could have made. Dissing a former customer in a public forum never looks good. But lying in the process and being caught out doing so is unforgivable.

Paul, don't get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the CEO getting involved in a situation like this. In fact, I would typically encourage it. My problem is that he chose to lie about me and to hurl personal insults. This doesn't bother me personally. Plenty of people insult me!!! What it does do is it blackens the Blueface brand and it makes Feargal look bad.

If I were advising him I would have told him to leave a comment along the lines of

Tom, I am very sorry you had issues with our product. We have made many changes and improvements to our infrastructure in the last 14 months since you had these issues. I would love to have you try our service again and see for yourself just how much it has improved

Those kind of sentiments would go a lot further, and would make the Blueface company look far better than trying to smear me with personal insults and falsehoods.

However, in this case the CEO responded privately to me by email in October 2006 when I first published the blog post.

In his response at the time he specifically referred to the blog post.

For some bizarre reason he decided, out of the blue, to start a debate about the blog post again in February 2008. That he did so is strange enough. But the manner in which he did so, where he made unfounded , false personal allegations about me, speaks volumes about his ability as a CEO.

Robert,

that's fantastic news, congrats on the move.

And remember, if Fastcompany are looking for anyone to help you in Europe, I'm in the market for work at the minute(!)

Unfortunate timing Paul, today is the first anniversary of my mother's death.

Won't be able to make either of the days.

Does that mean Robert that you successfully got your info out and were then banned. Or did it stop somewhere between the 1800 and the 5000?

Can it use your wifi connection to send the video or does it have to send over 3g?

Obviously wifi would be waaaay cheaper but I see no mention of it on the website.

If I didn't know you better Matthew, I'd swear you were gloating ;-)

Hey Robert,

it is unfortunate you had a problem with your update.

I was more lucky. My update to Leopard fixed two issues I had with 10.4 and my update to 10.5.1 fixed a further issue I had so overall I'm delighted with Leopard and this update.

My Vista experience has been awful. Within 10 minutes of running it I found a bug which Microsoft were unaware of! It still runs dog slow (on a new dual core Vaio with 2gb ram) and Microsoft Support gave up trying to fix one of the problems I was having with it. Seriously. They emailed me and said sorry, we can't fix it!

I'm sure by SP2 Vista will be reasonably ok. Leopard though is already fantastic on 10.5.1

Andy, wow!

Thanks a million for listing me in your list of top 10 UK and Irish blogs!

Thanks for the overly kind words about my blog Robert!

I'd be delighted if Pat won this. He has some serious competition but his product offerings are amazing and are doing incredible things to level the playing field on call charges.

Finally international calling and roaming will be affordable to all!

Go Pat! Corcaigh abu!

David's death affected me deeply too Robert.

Now, I ask myself every day, what if today is the last day of my life? What do I want to achieve on the last day of my life?

One day, I'll be right.

I'm sorry Nic, I have to disagree with you on this one.

I read this site and most others through my rss reader. Very few sites are publishing ads through their rss feeds.

If people are serious about not wanting users viewing ad-free versions of their sites, they should stop publishing rss feeds.

Alternatively, they should publish ads in their rss feed, if they are determined to show ads to anyone/everyone who wants to view their content.

If they take that approach though, they better have pretty compelling content because it is very easy to unsubscribe from an rss feed if the quality of the content doesn't mitigate the annoyance of the ads.