Posts

National Geographic has a special section on their news site about hard rock mining. There was a story in the March National Geographic about the mining industry in the Western United States, and the environmental havock it has wreaked. The people who are against reform of the Mining Act of 1872 are pathetically shortsighted. You know, I’d have more sympathy for the computer industry’s constant requests for more visas for foreign workers if I saw more industry-wide efforts to help Americans obtain the skills they need to get jobs in the computer industry. I’m not against immigration at all, but I’d like to see the industry working toward solutions to the worker shortage other than bringing in foreigners that they can hire below market rates. In some ways, I think it would be more productive for these companies to open foreign offices so that the money they pay the workers goes straight into their local economy. For India and other countries that send workers to America, it must be very disheartening to see so many smart people leave for greener pastures. ...

OK, I was mildly interested in the 5k Web Design contest when it was announced, but now that I’ve seen the finalists, I’m very impressed. People have done some really, really cool things within the 5k constraint. Not even the Justice Department can teach an old dog new tricks. I hate getting HTML mail, so I’m not heartened by RadicalMail’s development of an applet that can be embedded in an email message to stream audio and video to the luckless person who opens one of their messages. How long will it be before busy people just start filtering out every email message that doesn’t come from someone that’s already in their address book? ...

They’re taping U.S. episodes of the Iron Chef. I watch the dubbed/subtitled episodes on Food TV, and I find it to be the most entertaining show on television.

More frontier justice from Texas: an ex-con will be doing a 16 year hitch in the penitentiary for shoplifting a king size Snickers bar at a convenience store. It looks like I may just be linking to everything Joel from Joel on Software writes from now on. Yesterday’s excellent article explains why it’s not a good idea to just throw away your source code and start over, no matter how much you want to. (And believe me, I’ve been tempted to rewrite all the code on every project I’ve ever worked on. There’s always crufty old code that deserves to be replaced.) ...

John Gilmore’s idea for a patent license is wickedly clever. A new low for the media? Leonardo DiCaprio interviews President Clinton under the aegis of ABC News. You know, one thing I really appreciate about the MPAA is that they’re willing to go the extra mile to test the Constitution. If it weren’t for the greedheads at the MPAA, RIAA, and other industry trade groups, we might never know how the Constitution applies to the online world. Fortunately, because these losers think that the laws of this country exist to protect their right to make money in every way possible, the courts get to hash out how far our civil rights extend. They’ve already managed to get a judge to ban the posting of the source code to DeCSS on the Internet (a decision that will likely be overturned on the bases of another ruling), and now they’re trying to get a judge to prevent people from linking to the already banned source code. ...

The Netscape Navigator 6 preview is available for download. Try it out and let me know if you think it sucks. (I haven’t downloaded it yet myself.) Wired News has a story on North Carolina’s idiotic WAVE program that rewards students for signing up to report on classmates that they feel might go postal. It’s good to see this program getting increased media attention, and I got a laugh out of the fact that it violates COPA, the law that protects the privacy of children online. ...

Scott Rosenberg is wistful about the whole Microsoft anti-trust ordeal, and so am I. What good will the ruling do? Perhaps none. Even though I’m glad to see an independent court reach the same damning conclusion that so many Microsoft watchers came to long ago, I really think that the market is going to have to take care of Microsoft if we want to restore meaningful consumer choice in the personal computer industry. ...

The mediator handling the negotiations between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the antitrust case has given up, which probably means that we’ll see Judge Jackson’s verdict this Friday. The judge urged the litigants to settle, but it looks like that wasn’t going to happen, probably because of the 19 states participating in the suit. Microsoft, the DOJ and all 19 states had to approve any settlement agreement, and let’s face it, it’s hard to get 21 parties in any negotiation to agree on anything. At this point, I wish that the states hadn’t joined the suit at all. ...

More evidence that IBM really gets it: at least some people there see Linux as a top to bottom answer to all their operating system needs. They’re running Beowulf on massive clusters of Intel-based servers, and they’re also running thousands of copies of Linux concurrently on a single mainframe. Cool stuff. Developers are skeptical about Microsoft’s proposed concessions in the antitrust case. Mike Godwin has an extensive article on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the National Law Journal. The DMCA is an evil law that punishes people for circumventing copy protection even if they own the protected work itself. It’s the club being used to bludgeon the people who wrote DeCSS. ...

Today I managed to blow up Linux Mandrake 7.0 trying to get TrueType fonts to work. I read this document and some of the documents that are linked to it, but all I managed to do was get X to crash and never come back again. Back to the drawing board. Over at XML.com, Simon St. Laurent reviews the XML support in Mozilla. It seems like at least one person really gets it when it comes to open standards. (I actually think that quite a few people at IBM get it. For a company that seemed totally out of touch in the eighties and early nineties, IBM is really on the cutting edge these days.) ...