Posts

More guerilla marketing news today: a Georgia songwriter snarfed some domain names like stephencase.com that were related to the AOL/Time Warner merger, wrote a song about it, and then directed those domains to a place to download an MP3 of the song. Now they’re writing news stories about him. Brilliant. perl.com has an article about development teams and coding standards that’s pretty interesting. I feel obliged to report that Transmeta finally announced what they’ve been working on in secret for all these years – a low power microprocessor that will emulate Intel x86 chips in software. The one they’re releasing now will power handhelds, and one released later this year will attempt to supplant Intel chips in laptops. Linus Torvalds has been working on a mobile version of Linux to run on the chips. The most interesting thing about all this is the level of exposure Transmeta is getting thanks to their obsession with total secrecy until now. Another brilliant marketing move … people were dying to see the announcement, even though their product offerings are useful but not thrilling. I defer to EE Times for stories about silicon, here’s a link to their article. ...

There’s a syndicated New York Times story that would appear to be ripped from the pages of the Onion. The headline: Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find. The Canadian federal government is going to subsidize the Canadian teams in the National Hockey League so that they can compete with the US teams. Inktomi has a page showing some statistics for the pages that they index. According to their statistics, Apache has a 60% market share. Awesome! ...

Joyce Millman has a preview of the new season of the Sopranos, which begins on Sunday night. If you don’t have HBO yet, it’s probably too late for you. Definitely start asking around the office to find somewhere to watch the show. The government is making a half-assed effort to ease up on crypto in order to get rid of some pesky lawsuits, but it seems like the plaintiffs are going to press on. I fall firmly into the camp that believes restricting the distribution of cryptography software is a clear violation of our first amendment rights, and so far the courts have agreed. Why give up now? ...

There’s an incredible cover story over at Salon today. They’re reporting that US government indirectly paid TV networks to incorporate anti-drug themes into their programming. In fact, government staffers actually reviewed and signed off on scripts before the networks got their kickback. The payment was delivered by giving advertising time that the government had paid a discount rate for back to the networks so that they could sell it to advertisers paying full price. ...

The New York Times reports that CBS used digital technology to insert a fake billboard into their live coverage of New Years eve in Times Square. They covered up real Budweiser and NBC billboards with a digitally created CBS billboard and inserted it into the live feed. As far as I’m concerned, inserting fake stuff into news video is an ethical no-no. I think that when you see Dan Rather broadcasting live from an event, it’s reasonable to expect that the stuff you see on camera is real. Perhaps they could solve this problem by just superimposing the phrase, “Some of this stuff is fake” on the bottom of the screen. That should clear things up. ...

After a discussion about mod_perl yesterday, I started looking for interesting resources on the Web. Of course, the main mod_perl site is perl.apache.org. Of particular interest is this document describing some real world configurations you can use with mod_perl. The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice rundown of who owns what in the media world. It’s presented in a boring format, but the information is there. A watchful reader reports that iEntertainment Network K-Teled last week. After the announcement of a co-branded gaming site with Red Hat, the stock market rewarded IENT with 89 percent gain. ...

Oh. My. Goodness. AOL and Time Warner to merge? I wonder what this means for “open access” to cable for ISPs, now that AOL will become one of the largest cable companies? This merger is downright scary on so many levels. A Russian cracker stole thousands of credit card numbers from an online CD store, and posted them on his Web site after his blackmail attempts failed. This is probably what the company would refer to as a worst case scenario. ...

Scott Rosenberg’s first column of the new millennium catalogs a few of the mistaken predictions that plagued the previous decade. The one that particularly stings is the predicted death of AOL. If only we had been correct … Two in a row! Today’s John Carroll article deconstructs a nasty Cadillac commercial in which rattlesnakes serve as proxies for underprivileged people.

I yucked it up reading Declan McCullagh’s rundown of the gloomiest Y2K predictions he could find. The new law outlawing “cyberpiracy” (who coined that stupid term anyway?) is a bust from the start. While some people may feel that it’s unethical to speculate on domain names, I honestly don’t see how it can be illegal. If I signed up for the telephone number 1-800-786-5282, which could be read as 1-800-SUN-JAVA, does Sun have a right to sue me? If I purchase the land where Microsoft is planning on expanding their corporate campus, can Microsoft sue me? What’s the difference in doing that and registering a domain name that happens to match another company’s name? Domain names are a valuable commodity. To give people exclusive rights to particular domain names based on the fact that they use that name elsewhere seems like yet another example of the rampant corporatism that seems to rule our lousy government and legal system. ...

A coworker forwarded me this analysis of Linux market share. According to the author, Linux is already 80% of the way toward dominance of the desktop market! We can dream, can’t we? Food for thought: Bruce Sterling’s The Manifesto of January 3, 2000. Here’s an article that explains how to capture a book’s sales ranking from Amazon.com using Visual Basic 6. It also has an explanation of how the sales ranking system at Amazon.com works. Why use VB for those types of jobs when Perl is available? ...