Posts

Stratfor previews foreign policy under a George W. Bush, Jr. administration. I’m going to point to the interview with David Eggers in the Harvard Advocate, despite the fact that everyone else already has, because I finally got around to reading it, and you know what, it’s full of incredibly sage advice. The Well is hosting a publicly viewable panel discussion on copyright, the Internet, and music. The panelists are Salon’s Scott Rosenberg, musician David Gans, Adam Powell, and Mike Godwin (of Godwin’s Law fame). All Well members are allowed to post to the topic, so I’m sure there will be many other participants as well. ...

Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I took the news that the polar ice cap has actually melted a bit hard. I generally fall into the “we don’t know enough yet” camp when it comes to global warming, but news like this still freaks me out. Sure, there’s a good chance that it’s not the fault of industrial society, but maybe we could at least try to hedge a little just in case. ...

I watched Al Gore’s acceptance speech last night. I’m no expert on political speeches, but I will say that he seemed to stay true to himself. I think that counts for something. The DeCSS verdict is in, and guess what, Judge Kaplan blew it. Chalk up the win for big business and the legislation they bought and paid for, the DMCA. Not only did the judge rule that it is illegal to distribute DeCSS, he also ruled that it’s illegal to create a hyperlink to anyone else who’s distributing DeCSS. It seems obvious to me that 2600 lost the case because of who they are and who the plaintiffs are – the judge doesn’t seem to understand what DeCSS is, that DVDs can easily be copied without it, and that it’s really just a device for protecting the financial interests of the group of companies licensed to make DVD players. What a travesty. ...

According to Michael Dell, ten percent of the servers Dell ships have Linux preinstalled. That’s more than I would have thought. Nautilus 0.1 is now available for download. I don’t have a very current version of Linux installed on my computer, but I’m ordering Debian 2.2 today, so hopefully I’ll be able to get Nautilus up and running soon. Mastercard has sued Ralph Nader for repurposing their “priceless” TV ad theme in a campaign ad. Now he doesn’t even have to pay to run the ad to have it widely publicized and talked about around the country. ...

I don’t know about you, but I nearly choked when I first heard that AOL was buying Netscape. Now AOL is working on porting their client to Linux! What’s next, AOL becoming the new maintainer of GCC? Buzzword battle royale: O’ReillyNet on Microsoft .NET versus J2EE. MAPS (the Realtime Blackhole List people) have issued a press release in response to the lawsuit filed by the Harris Poll people against Microsoft, AOL, and their organization. I certainly don’t see how MAPS could be held responsible for anything, all they do is publish a list of IP addresses of sites they consider to be spammers, it’s the voluntary subscribers who are actually taking action. ...

Great Bridge, the company formed to support Postgres (the open source relational database), has released benchmarks showing that Postgres outperforms MySQL and Interbase by a wide margin, and keeps up with two unnamed proprietary relational databases. (We can all hope that they’re SQL Server and Oracle 8i.) The proprietary databases remain unnamed due to restrictive licensing agreements that disallow publishing of benchmark statistics. (These benchmarks, like all benchmarks, should be taken with a grain of salt.) ...

David Strom recommends Microsoft Media Player despite his reservations about Microsoft in general. Outdoing companies like Real Networks and Musicmatch should be easy, because their software totally sucks. If I didn’t have to use RealPlayer to listen to baseball games over the Internet, I’d have uninstalled that piece of garbage long ago. There’s an official Sun coding convention for Java. Who knew? Politics, politics, politics. Tim O’Reilly notes that if you lump UNIX and Linux together, they outsold Windows according to the latest IDC report. Unfortunately, Linux and UNIX aren’t lumped together due to crankiness on both sides. ...

Salon has a rundown of AOL’s woes involving MP3 sharing. Aimster seems to be particularly slick, I wonder if it’s being produced by a real company. Creating a business around illegally swapping MP3s by piggybacking on a proprietary network that attempts to shut out all unauthorized users doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. Analysts seem to be missing the boat on Amazon.com’s new deal with Toys-R-Us. It seems pretty clear to me that Amazon.com is just acting as an outsourcer – they’re providing Toys-R-Us with an online store, because Toys-R-Us can’t do it themselves (as they proved last Christmas). Toys-R-Us is paying them money to build and maintain the store, plus a small percentage of revenues. Sounds like Yahoo Store on a grand scale to me … ...

The State Department lost a laptop with information about nuclear weapons and is offering a $25,000 reward to get it back. Apparently they have no idea where it went, or who took it. Miguel de Icaza has posted a detailed followup to the Unix sucks talk he gave at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. The FBI is going to send Carnivore out to one university to review. I think that’s just stupid. I guess it’s better than nothing, but if you’re going to let the cat out of the bag, why not just put it out there for public review so that everyone can be satisfied, and so that flaws can be found? Half measures make no sense. ...

There’s an article on C# in MSDN Magazine. The article provides yet another simplistic overview of the new features in C#, and takes a gratuitous swipe at Java, but doesn’t do a clear job of explaining why C# is better than Java. I guess it’s targetted at people who live in the Microsoft world and would never consider using Java anyway. Keith Packard is adding anti-aliasing to X. It’s about time – anti-aliasing was the number one item on my “Unix on the desktop” wish list. I just can’t bear to browse the Web under X right now, but hopefully with the release of Mozilla and the incorporation of anti-aliasing into XFree86, that will change. (Thanks, Wes.) ...