Bad journalism in the Washington Post: XML was not invented by two guys at Microsoft. xmlhack has the reactions of some members of the XML community. I can’t wait until AIWA releases their in-dash MP3 player for cars. It plays both regular CDs and CDs with MP3s on them, which you can make at home. Steven Champeon blasts Microsoft for their damned lies, arrogance, and hypocrisy on all sorts of issues. Believe me, they had it coming. ...
Apache.org was hacked recently entirely through configuration problems. Be careful. Tara Calishain sent along a pointer to this story: the Washington state Supreme Court ruled that shrinkwrap licenses are legally binding in a case where a construction firm sued a software company when a bug in the software caused them to underbid on a project by $1.95 million. I’m thinking that the construction firm should have reviewed the bid before submitting it, but I also think that allowing companies to disclaim responsibility for their mistakes like that is foolish. Certainly it doesn’t move us toward higher quality software. The scary thing is that UCITA hasn’t passed in Washington yet. Just wait until software makers can use UCITA to totally abuse their customers … ...
A reader submitted a link to a San Francisco Bay Guardian story about the environmental and worker health problems associated with the manufacturing side of the high tech industry. It’s easy to forget about this stuff when your job involves reshuffling electrons all day, but all those monitors, RAM chips, and motherboards have to be made somewhere. The fact of the matter is that the computer hardware manufacturers aren’t ahead of their counterparts in steel mills, oil refineries, or lead mines. The story itself is a long investigative piece that’s definitely worth reading. ...
Just to clear things up: RedHatIsNotLinux.Org. Salon takes a look back at the success of the dot com Super Bowl ads, three months after they ran. Unsurprisingly, they were a total failure. Also unsurprisingly, the morons who run the companies that bought the ads are excited about them anyway. Where were these idiots hiding before people started pumping money into the Internet?
Scott Rosenberg hits the nail on the head once again in criticizing the statements of Chairman Bill in the wake of the proposed remedies in the antitrust case, and at the same time lambasting the government’s idiotic proposal. The government generally operates pretty stupidly, but when you have to get the DOJ and 19 state attorney generals to agree on one set of remedies, it’s a recipe for disaster. I honestly think that this whole affair would already have been settled if the negotiations hadn’t involved the 19 states as well as the federal government. ...
Michael Sippey on Pyra. If someone took a poll asking what the sleaziest job in the world is, spokesman for an industry trade group would have to be near the top of the list. How would you like it if your job were trying to make every nasty thing an industry does look good? At least attorneys can fall back on the argument that they’re acting within the context of an adversarial legal system. Anyway, Hilary Rosen paints a rosy picture of the RIAA in a Salon interview. ...
frontwheeldrive has an interview with Dominic Giampaolo that in part covers his thoughts on the world of open source software, and the difficulties of building a profitable company around it. His concerns about how to they can make money echo my own. (I had never seen frontwheeldrive.com before, it’s very nice. I found it through Wes Felter’s Hack the Planet.) So the other day my wife calls me on the phone and tells me our hub is unplugged and that she can’t print. I tell her to just grab the unplugged cable off the floor that fits and plug it into the hub. Unfortunately, there were three things that I did not know. The first is that the power supply for an IBM ThinkPad has the same connector as the power supply for a NetGear hub. The second is that I had the power supply for an IBM ThinkPad from my old job plugged into the wall for when I brought my laptop home. The third is that ThinkPad power supplies provide a lot more power than hub power supplies (although I could have guessed this one). Anyway, after a bad incident involving heat, I had to order a new hub from buy.com yesterday. ...
Yesterday I read former Autodesk CEO John Walker’s famous call to arms, Information Letter 14. It was written in spring of 1991, and predicted the near future of the PC industry at that time amazingly well. His argument in favor of integrating AutoCAD with Windows is particularly interesting in light of the current controversy over the Mozilla UI. Mozilla is the same on every platform, and consequently doesn’t look like the native applications on any of those platforms. AutoCAD was in the same boat, and I agree with Walker that integration is very important. The nightmare scenario is pretty humorous as well, given Microsoft’s activities over the past 9 years. ...
All I want to know is, will this agreement get me any closer to getting broadband to my residence? Cable modems, DSL, two cans and a high bandwidth string … at this point I just don’t care any more as long as it’s better than a modem. Cool project alert: Freenet is an anti-censorship tool based on a network of distributed servers. When a resources is added to a Freenet, it becomes virtually impossible to remove, since it can exist on any or all of the servers, and there’s no way to know which servers it’s on. The bigger the Freenet becomes, the harder it is to control. Neat stuff. There’s also a News.com story about Freenet. ...
Web Techniques has an overview of PHP 4.0, which is now out of beta. Q dug up this report on Elian Gonzalez by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It contains a lot of detail about the life of the boy and his family prior to the shipwreck that isn’t found in the mainstream news articles. The more I learn about this case, the worse the relatives in Miami (and their co-conspirators) look. ...