Neville’s posterous

[...] At today's Enterprise 2.0 conference, Yammer announced that 50,000 networks have been established with its service. We asked Yammer's Steve Apfelberg what the size of these networks look like. He said they run from a few people to a few thousand, with an average of about 25 to 50 people per network. He declined to provide details about the number of paying clients but said they are showing revenues. But if you did the math, it could be extrapolated that Yammer has 1.25 to 2.5 million customers. How many of those are paying for the Yammer service?

[...] Here's an interview with Apfelberg and a demo of the Yammer service:

I know of around a dozen companies in the UK where Yammer's in use, set up informally by groups of employees. None are paying for the service yet.

[...] Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit.

We have created an initial set of sections to get you started. There's one on Space, and others on topics such as U.S. Foreign Policy, Global Trade, Solar Power, and Hollywood. If you like them, click on "Add this section" and they'll appear on your home page.

The feature is currently available in the Google News editions for Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and we look forward to expanding it soon.

A picture from the US. Bucking a trend?

What to do if you have any info -

Phone: +44 845 838 4699
Email: investigation@findmadeleine.com

There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?

Heh, nice to know what a yottabyte means, never mind the Big Brother concerns :)

[...] Here are some very basic facts:

1. When you purchase software, you are purchasing the rights to run the software according to the terms of the End User License Agreement (EULA) that comes with that software.
2. When you install that software, you are agreeing to the terms included in the EULA you purchased.
   - For instance, in the Windows 7 EULA it states, “By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit.”
3. When you purchase an Upgrade license, the included EULA states that you must already own a qualifying full license to upgrade from in order to use the Upgrade license, hence the term “Upgrade.”
   - For instance, in the Windows 7 EULA it states, “To use upgrade software, you must first be licensed for the software that is eligible for the upgrade.”

To put it simply, here is a graphical representation of what this means:

General Example		Example with Product Names

In stark contrast to:

General Example		Example with Product Names

So when these posts and write-ups state that you can install clean from an Upgrade piece of software and they fail to mention that you need to own a qualifying software license to be legal to use the Upgrade software for the installation, they give the impression that because it is technically possible, it is legal to do. Unfortunately, by doing this, they irresponsibly put end users at risk of loading unlicensed software. Because of this, I am putting this post up to try and clarify the truth behind what an upgrade license is and provides so that hopefully people will not find themselves misled by some of these other posts and articles that may mislead them to believe something that is very wrong due to their lack of inclusion of this important piece of information.  If the posts or write-ups you saw did include this information, then kudos to that writer for providing the accurate information.

This is why DRM or whatever equivalent evolves will be around in the future - trust in people is really difficult sometimes.

The number one reason people give us for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their plugins won’t be compatible. As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in the plugin directory, powered by your votes. When viewing a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-downs. If there has been feedback about this WordPress / plugin version combination, we’ll show you what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible vs how many marked it as incompatible.

...

What a great idea. Much too hit-and-miss right now in knowing plugin versions and what would work in a new WP.

As you might have noticed, we use Thesis for this site. We also use Thesis for a lot of client work.  And while we dig Thesis, one of the things that becomes a pain in the ass when using it, (or any theme that provides admin control of layout and design) is having to manually add common layout and design settings that we use regularly.  With the release of Thesis 1.6, this has become even a bigger issue due to all the new font and color control features.

As things move forward, more and more skin designs will start incorporating admin panel settings rather than relying on the traditional style sheet approach. And that means skins will become less and less “plug & play” because you will have to spend time inputing dozens of settings to get your skin to look like the original demo. And skin designers will need to spend a bunch of time creating additional instructions that list all the items that need to be changed. (For a great example, check out all the work that went into Ben’s post on his latest skin).

That seems like a bunch of needless work to me, so I asked Dax to break out the import/export tools we use that deal with Thesis into a stand alone plugin. The concept is pretty simple. After you upload and activate it, you can download individual data files for Thesis Options, Design Options, and all OpenHook content. (located at Appearance > Thesis Import/Export)

So once you have completed a skin design, or custom layout for a client, you can just export the data files and then bundle them with the plugin. Once the skin is installed, the user simply uploads the bundled data files and all the original settings, hooks, etc. will be imported.

The only words of caution you will need with this plugin has to do with the restore functions. If you click on those links before you have saved a backup, all your settings will be lost!

Download Thesis Settings Export Plugin Here

Yes! This looks exactly like the answer to my question!
Via Chris Pearson.

Fiery race-car crashes, exploding oil refineries, policemen shot in the chest at point-blank range -- these are just some of DuPont's new social-media tools. Fearing that it's losing touch with young professionals who don't read traditional media, the chemical giant developed a social-media strategy anchored in viral video. Digging into its archive, it pulled out some of its most spectacular product test and demonstration footage. And this became the core of a series of three-minute programs hosted by video blogger Amanda Congdon and distributed widely across online video sites.

See all the videos at http://stories.dupont.com/

Presentation recorded at WordCamp Seattle 2009.