Friday, August 23, 2002

Ouch

Charles Cooper: Why Larry Lessig gets an F in software.

Thanks to Jim Thompson for the pointer. Jim also points out that, in reality, commercial software of the non-open source sort is protected by trade secrecy, not copyright.

Not.

The speaker from Microsoft just said "DRM be damned. Just burn 'em." She was joking. "I didn't say that," she just said.

I've spent a bunch of time with her. She may be the best employee at the company.

Just doing my job

I'm still hacking away on my Future of Linux talk tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am in possession of several major Linux news items that won't run until Monday (the biggest one is an NDA). Anyway, check Linux Journal then to see what those are about.

Meanwhile, any input for my talk is welcome too. Credit will be given.

A first, I'm sure

Chris is blogging his own eponymous conference.

Putting me suddenly on the all-saliva diet

Hey Gnomesters: Mary tells us where to eat here in her home town.

Reality check

Mary, who knows AOL far more intimately that the rest of us would ever want to, clues us in on how and why the company won't take the best advice they've ever been given.

By the way, Steve Gibson, another old Compuserve hand (as are Mary and I -- she a wizop, me a sysop), is on stage now.

Maybe we should have a Gnomedex Blog BOF

Leo has a list of the Gnomedex blogroll. Quite a few people, including Frank Paynter. Frank is a one-man wrecking crew against the whole idea that nobody reads long-form text on the Web.

I see Gnome-Girl (on line, but not yet in meet/meat space). Gretchen is here too, doing a great job. Both add to the roll of smart&superfine babebloggers.

Michael Fraase just came over. I love his camera: a Canon Powershot G2. Outstanding.

Tech support question

In medicine they call this a fascinoma. It's something that's clearly wrong but has no explanation anybody can find. But if we can find and fix it, we'll make some few conference-attending geeks happy.

A few of us seem to be able to connect only downstairs in the main auditorium (which is cool: it's where we're supposed to be anyway). Upstairs, where the other access point is, we can't. This is true for all of the Macs running OS X. It's also true for a number of the PC users. In all cases we're using 802.11b (we are told). The access points run both 802.11a and b.

Upstairs, where the problem is, my laptop gets assigned an IP address, but the machine can't ping the server... or anything other than itself. But other machines can ping my machine at my assigned IP address.

The only unsual thing about the setup (far as I know) is that it requires each machine's MAC address.

So I thought I'd cast a net on the Net and see if anybody's run across this before.

[Later...] New data point I just lost connectivity down here in the auditorium, and restored it by turning Airport off and on again. Weird.

Mythmongering

I'm finally up at Gnomedex. For reasons unknown, every laptop but mine got on the Net over the wi-fi kindly provided by Proxim. It was frustrating while it lasted, which was all morning.

But hey, it finally came up, and here I am, and Rob Rosenberger of Vmyths is on stage, talking about virus hoaxes. Very funny guy.

[Later...] Michael Fraase is doing a much better job than I am of blogging this thing.

Leo Laporte's here too. Got some great hang-time with him yesterday afternoon. Great guy. Funny, smart, extremely knowledgeable and very modest about it.

Affirmative democracy

Sheila Lennon: Future-building.

I think her answer ought to be AOTC.

Mo Motown

I want this CD set.

[Later...] ChuqD points to an upcoming documentary on the Funk Brothers, which were the best rhythm section ever to walk the Earth. Or at least the one most prone to making hit records. These guys were the Motown sound.