Today is World AIDS Day. My buddies over at Medley and Genehack have redesigned their pages specifically for the Day Without Weblogs. I didn’t, but AIDS prevention and the search for a cure for AIDS are on my mind today. Rather than including a Day Without Art banner on this page, I’ll just provide you with a link to the whole list of banners that were made available. Check them all out, they’re really powerful. ...
As a followup on the Miami riot thing, here’s a link to a column by Carl Hiaassen on the incident. He says that GOP Rep. John Sweeney’s “Shut it down” statement was in reference to the protest, not the recount, contradicting the Salon article I linked to yesterday. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that the recount was stopped because of this protest. What bothers me is that members of the GOP leadership hoped that this protest would shut down the recount. I also don’t necessarily believe that Bush was involved in any of this, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Tom DeLay and his buddies hatched this plan all on their own. ...
I know this is not news to many people, but corporate media really sucks. The link in a previous paragraph is a FAIR report on the vanishing standards of journalism over at ABC, which is, of course, property of Disney. It’s amazing that we trust the major networks to report on anything. The author of the PING utility, Mike Muuss, died in an auto accident last week. I linked to his story on the history of PING not long ago. Rest in peace, Mike. ...
Tara “ResearchBuzz” Calishain sent me a link to this article about eroding support for UCITA, the large scale effort by software companies to get laws passed that allow them to stick it to their customers. eBay is branching out to provide auction services to other Web sites. I’m surprised they hadn’t done this already. I haven’t registered for the program, but the brief information on this page seems to indicate that they’re using some sort of XML-RPC protocol. It’s unknown whether this protocol is based on any written standard. ...
For more scoop on the problems with Netscape 6, check out the reader reports page at Macintouch. Brutal.
I was so depressed by the general lack of quality of Netscape 6 that I went and downloaded the latest daily build of Mozilla just to make sure that I wasn’t crazy in evangelizing their work for the past few years. Turns out I was right, the latest daily builds of Mozilla are much, much better than Netscape 6. I don’t know what AOL did to screw things up, but if you want to use Netscape, you’ll be much happier using whatever has washed over then transom from the Mozilla project than Netscape 6. ...
Customer service workers at Amazon.com are looking to unionize in order to fight what they consider to be poor working conditions. I have a problem with some unions in particular, but I think that organized labor is a good thing overall. Amazon.com argues that the workers don’t need a union, which pretty much guarantees that they do. I was looking forward to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but I think I’ll wait for it to appear on HBO after listening to Tom Shales absolutely savage the movie on NPR this morning. It’s actually gotten a number of good reviews, but I’m willing to bet that Shales is right. I find it very difficult to believe that the original cartoon version could be improved upon. ...
Analysts are reporting that AOL’s huge market share advantage in instant messaging is eroding. Perhaps they should support an open standard before it’s too late. For what it’s worth, I use Yahoo. Despite my general disappointment in Netscape 6, AOL does deserve credit for documenting the browser’s deficiencies in copious detail.
The W3C has published the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Views and Formatting Specification. I can’t help but find it strangely amusing that these guys go on blithely writing and publishing these detailed specifications that the browser makers ignore at worst or bastardize at best. The gulf between the spec world and the implementation seems to be growing, too. You know, sometimes I like to think I’m more jaded than I really am. When this whole recount thing started in Florida, I thought, “Well, they have all the ballots, just recount the votes as accurately as possible and declare a winner.” I honestly didn’t imagine that what this really comes down to is who has the most political power to bring to bear in Florida. Ultimately, this election will be won by the party that manages to best manipulate the Florida statutes to their advantage, not by the candidate that got the most votes. Yeah, our vote counts, but not if the outcome is in dispute. ...
Netscape 6 is out. Run for the hills. Amazon.com is once again at the center of a big controversy – this time they’ve managed to piss off authors and publishers by making it easy for people to sell used books through Amazon.com, and listing the used copies on the product page for the book. Needless to say, a sale of a used book has a good chance of costing the publisher and author some revenue. That chance grows significantly when the person was on the page to buy (or at least look at) the new version of the book. As an author, I can’t say that this bothers me all that much. I imagine it’s a bit more frustrating to publishers. Anyway, you can check out the story in the Washington Post. ...