Here in North Carolina, the government has started a Hitler Youth type program to get kids in school to spy on each other. It was developed for our wonderful state by Pinkerton (a private security agency). The program was announced in a press release on February 10. I think that the most galling part of the program is that kids who inform on their classmates will be rewarded with prizes like T-shirts and hats. Jon Katz has picked up the story at Slashdot as well. ...
Mattel’s ongoing efforts to keep the public from learning which sites they block with their censorware package CyberPatrol are making them look like the eToys of the year 2000. Their latest attempt to squelch the distribution of the cphack software that reveals the list of blocked sites involved acquiring the intellectual property rights to the software. Unfortunately, it looks like Mattel’s lawyers failed to read the GPL, which prevents the copyright holder from restricting distribution of software released under that license. Sorry, suckers. The question that springs to mind when I think about censorware is, “Why is it important to keep the list of blocked sites secret?” If I were a parent, I’d want to know which sites this software blocks. ...
Charles Crystle, the founder of ChiliSoft, seems like a really cool guy. He plans on giving away 11 of the 15 million dollars he made when Cobalt Networks bought ChiliSoft to provide high-tech educational opportunities to people in Central America, where he spent two months decompressing from the stress of his job not long ago. In other high tech philanthropy news, Bob Pasker and Laurie Pitman, two of the founders of WebLogic, donated 2.4 million dollars to endow the history department at San Francisco State. It’s the largest donation to the university ever. ...
You know what pisses me off? Executive compensation. At some point in the past, people decided it would be a good idea to tie executive pay to the company’s overall performance by compensating them with stock instead of hard cash. Somewhere along the line that got bastardized into giving these executives so much stock that they make out like bandits no matter how ineptly they manage their companies. The article doesn’t even get to the real joke on most of the people who work for a living: if CEOs actually screw up so badly that they get fired, they generally get a huge severence package that leaves them independently wealthy. ...
Jef Poskanzer has written an excellent to tutorial on configuring and building a PC. He covers all the parts you need and what difference buying different parts makes. Definitely worth looking at if you’re going to buy a new PC or upgrade one you already have.
I’m probably incredibly late to the party on this, but I played FreeCiv yesterday, and it’s really, really cool. FreeCiv is an open source clone of Civilization, the ultimate turn-based strategy game. If you’re not running Linux, you can play FreeCiv using the Linux desktop at Workspot. Salon’s cover story today is about the increasing number of incredibly bloated magazines that cover the “new economy”. I have to confess that I don’t read any of them, but the last time I looked them over, I was amazed at how huge these things have become. Fast Company and Business 2.0 have gotten about as fat as Vogue or those JC Penny catalog-sized bridal magazines. And the sad thing is that these magazines are incredibly boring. Cast aside these magazines and pick up the New Yorker or the Economist. At least they’ll fit in your briefcase. ...
The Wired News redesign sucks. From deep within the bowels of AOL West … err … Netscape, the Navigator 6 beta has been announced. According to the press release, the beta will be available in less than a month. The biggest question I have is whether they’ll create some skins that actually look like the OS the browser is running on. I’m always up for reading a Noam Chomsky interview. Aren’t you?
Tom’s Hardware has an interesting article on the failings of RAMBUS memory. Even if you don’t care about PC hardware at all, this article is illustrative of two important truths. The first is the amazing gap between hype and reality. RAMBUS technology is ridiculously inferior to normal SDRAM (which nearly all PCs use today) in terms of price versus performance and even flat oiut performance, and looks to remain inferior to it for the foreseeable future. Even so, RAMBUS share prices are astronomically high because Intel partnered with them. Why did Intel partner with them? So that they could earn a fat chunk of cash through licensing fees on the proprietary technology. So Intel is foisting overpriced, bad technology on their customers in order to increase their profits. Same as it ever was. The second truth is that the Web remains a wonderful medium for exposing this kind of customer-unfriendly behavior on the part of companies like Intel. It’s wonderful that an independent Web site like Tom’s Hardware can publish well researched, comprehensive articles like this one that completely blow technology mirages like RAMBUS out of the water, despite the fact that the traditional purveyors of hype are completely behind them. ...
I’m looking at ways to represent a hierarchical data structure (a la dmoz or Yahoo) in a relational database. I have some ideas, but I’m always looking for more. purl.org is a service that allows you to create Permanent URLs. Basically, they just provide a layer of abstraction between the user and the real URL you want to point to. If the real URL changes, you can just change the URL associated with the PURL and everyone who’s bookmarked or linked to that PURL will still be able to get to the resource you were pointing to. ...
Looks like I was wise not to link to the Gnutella site the other day. AOL (the owner of Nullsoft) put the kabosh on the project as soon as they found out about it. Does this remind anyone of the release and un-release of an instant messaging specification by Mozilla awhile back? I’m going to release all of the source code behind this Web site as soon as I can make it more generic and clean up a few things. I’ve already created a project at SourceForge for it, and hopefully I’ll have a release of the code up there in the next week or so. Once it’s all neatly packaged, it should give people a great head start in rolling their own Web logs if they’re proficient in PHP3 and Perl. The code will be released under the BSD license. ...