There are many different types of sausages. The best are from the north of England. The wurst are from Germany.

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Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
One officer, a sergeant on the force since 1992, has been transferred from the Staten Island Task Force to the 122nd Precinct pending the internal investigation.
The other, a cop for five years, still works on the task force.
As members of the unit, the officers, ages 36 and 32, would arrest the sellers of illegal DVDs and confiscate their stock.
Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.
There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.

Recent op Radio 1 een interview met een wetenschapper over onderzoek naar het gebruik van MP3-spelers in Nederland. Een van de bevindingen was dat een bezitter van een Apple iPod opvallend weinig illegale muziek op de iPod had staan. Terwijl bij MP3-spelers van andere merken illegaliteit juist de drijfveer leek om de speler te vullen. Da’s niet zo vreemd: het laden van gekochte CD’s uit de winkel is via iTunes in de iPod een fluitje van een cent. Het on-line kopen van muziek via de iTunes Music Store is hét voorbeeld geworden voor iedere andere aanbieder. Apple heeft met iTunes en de iPod de wereld laten zien dat de consument best bereid is om legaal muziek te luisteren. Het is illegaal geworden bij gebrek aan tijdig initiatief en visie. Tegen alle verwachtingen in presteerde Apple wat de muziekindustrie jarenlang had verzuimd: een serieuze poging doen het goed te regelen. En wat is het resultaat voor het initieen van de betaalde revolutie in de gobale poel van gratis illegaliteit..? Een boete van € 3,28 per gigabyte.

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in a random sample of programmers, there will be more named Steve then there will be females.

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Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide.

Jim, jim… you don’t get it, do you? I mean, the number of Britney Spears albums sold is not likely to be a deciding factor for me when picking music to listen to.

If you want a Longhorn machine to automatically configure itself so you can work in a coffee shop, it will. If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen. “You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time struggling with things,” Allchin said, adding that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: “It just works.”

Hmmm… I wonder where he copied that phrase?

. Longhorn doesn�t just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.

They keep dragging that one out to describe an “improvement” in usability. Where I work, all documents (from design specs to department meeting minutes) have a standard cover sheet. I guess all icons will still be the same then…

Microsoft’s research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items.

I wonder if that 20% productivity loss is factored into the TCO arguments they use…

Allchin did have a lot a lot to say about a major change that is coming to Windows this month. Rather than running just on computers that process 32 bits of data at a time, the new version will run on chips that process 64 bits. For Allchin, this is a very big deal for businesses and individuals. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that 64-bit computers will be much faster. They should also be more secure.

Wow, the author of the article really doesn’t have a clue. Talk about drinking the Cool-Aid….