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The American Taliban

Posted on June 7th, 2005 at 21:21 by John Sinteur in category: What were they thinking?

Read and weep


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Comments:

  1. Maarten on June 8th, 2005 at 3:38:

    Man, that page makes Ashcroft look good!

  2. The Gaucho on June 8th, 2005 at 11:16:

    This is pretty scary stuff…

  3. Kalior on June 8th, 2005 at 18:30:

    classy, as usual
    people like them made me lose my faith
    /born and raised catholic
    //achieved a class rank of 666 last semester >:-D

British plan to extend copyright on pop classics

Posted on June 7th, 2005 at 18:21 by John Sinteur in category: Intellectual Property

[Quote:]

The government wants to extend copyright laws to ensure pop songs are protected for almost twice as long as the current 50 yics – Sunday Times – Times Onlineears.

It sees the move as a way of generating more money for the record industry, which would use it to discover new talent.

It will mean Beatles classics such as Love Me Do and Please Please Me, released in 1963, need not automatically lose their copyright in 2013. The Rolling Stones could also benefit with songs such as Satisfaction having their copyright extended beyond 2015.

So we’ve already openly moved from “copyright is to support the artist” to “those poor companies…”

Up to now the pretense was that without copyright, artists would stop making music. And since everyone knows that unless the Beatles continue to make money from recordings made fifty years ago, they’ll have to quit music and get day jobs. Then society won’t get any new Beatles music, and then where will we be?

And why must copyright extensions always be retroactive? Are we afraid that The Beatles won’t write Love Me Do in 1963 if they didn’t expect royalties for a hundred years? The copyright deal back then was given, and works were created as intended; the incentive worked.

But now it’s clear – as an industry you can simply buy yourself a law to support a broken business model.


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WWDC 2005

Posted on June 7th, 2005 at 7:42 by John Sinteur in category: Apple


You can see an interesting piece of computer history being made here.


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Comments:

  1. Maarten on June 8th, 2005 at 3:34:

    So, uh, anyone seen any *interesting* commentary on the Intel shift?

  2. John Sinteur on June 8th, 2005 at 6:39:

    You mean like hardware, business model? No.

  3. Maarten on June 8th, 2005 at 18:57:

    Anything interesting of a higher fiber than “wahhhhhh it’s not a Mac if it’s got Intel Inside”. Any insight on why they didn’t pick AMD? (AMD seems to be focusing on the 64bit server market, but you’d think they’d be willing to bend their roadmap for a client the size of Apple.)

  4. John Sinteur on June 8th, 2005 at 19:07:

    No not really – Mostly guesses so far. Guess 1: Intel because Apple is fed up with dealing with “2nd place chip providers” Guess 2: new intel based hardware will first be low end – Mac Mini, iBook, PowerBook (in that order). Notebooks are now over 50% of all unit shipped in the US, and one of the major reasons Apple had to switch is the lack of a notebook G5. IBM probably had a choise as well: they now have to support the high end power line for servers, the cell processor, the G5 and the G4, One of those four had to be dropped – you can’t remain competitive with too many different lines. IBM probably wanted to drop the G4 from that list, leaving Apple without notebooks. Notebooks are also easier to “control”, hardware-wise, so next expo in august will probably see a demo of an MacIntel notebook. So far, there’s only guesswork, nothing is certain.

  5. Maarten on June 8th, 2005 at 20:56:

    Yes, so far the most compelling argument I’ve seen is the it’s-for-notebook-processors one. No low-power G5 on the horizon. And I guess AMD isn’t strong there either.

    Notebooks are easier to control–How so? I can see that being true in the Windows world where desktop machines are a chaos of different parts, but isn’t it more or less the same for Apple? e.g. the Mac Mini?

  6. John Sinteur on June 8th, 2005 at 21:21:

    Easier to control as in “less likely to immediately migrate to a cheap dell running Mac OS X 10.5″

    I mean, once I know OS X runs on anything I can build myself from components, I will immediately build my own machine for it. That’s something Apple appears to “not want” right now. Although I wonder, if they made a deal with Dell to bundle OS X, how much that would hurt Microsoft.

  7. Maarten on June 9th, 2005 at 17:06:

    That’s OK, if Dell does that I’m sure Msft will find an incentive to discourage them. (“Oops, did you not get the Longhorn golden master until a week after Gateway? So sorry!”)

500 of 230009 Random Icons

Posted on June 7th, 2005 at 2:29 by Michael in category: ¿ʞɔnɟ ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥʍ

[Quote:]

In order to compile a comprehensive compendium of favicon.ico links, I am searching for them in alphabetical order. The sequence goes as follows: a, b, c, ….z, aa, ab, ac, ….., zx, zy, zz, aaa, aab, aac, …., zzx, zzy, zzz, aaaa, aaab, …., zzzz, aaaaa, aaaab, …., zzzzz, etc.

I am also searching for favicons using various authoritative lists of domain names available for certain top level domains. A friend named “the hatter” is helping by running a dictionary attack against certain top level domains as well. In addition, people all over are submitting icons to the submission page. Soon to come is a link-following robot which will scan the web looking for domain names and web pages to check for favicons.


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