Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Also The Wrong, The Bad and The Ugly

Adam Engst: The Evil that is DMCA.

If the subhead above is obscure, it's explained a bit here, from somewhere back in '99.

Backthanks to Derek Miller for the link.

Thigh-fi

Typing this on my legs while squatting against a wall in the Wi-Fi Allilance booth, where I count up to ten differnet signals. For awhile there I thought none of them were worthy of a warchalk (a practice which is regretably absent here); but I just got on the net over one called wirelessb.

What's surprising to me here is the complete absence of any sense (ironic or otherwise) that wifi took off thanks to a groundswell of largely unauthorized deployment and adoption, rather than because vendors pushed it (not that pushage wasn't happening; but rather that it was by itself a highly insufficient condition).

Something from nothing

The results of RageBoy's recent searches seem to have changed from nada to yada. Except for the last item.

Just one question

Steve MacLaughlin is still on the Satellite Radio case. XM's latest toy looks real interesting to me. But it doesn't get the one thing I really want, which is NPR. Sirius Radio however, does.

How unlucky for them

Microsoft has apparently been having a Ms. Moxie contest for something-or-other. Not clear.

Anyway, they apparently proceeded without running a search for the Real Deal.

What happens when you give customers ways to stop being consumers

Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs:

Someone needs to develop a small application that would do for OS X what Conflict Catcher did for OS 9: a "system merge" that lets you merge the stuff the Jaguar installer misses. If you occasionally log in as the "root" user, the installer misses almost all the root preferences. It also misses any sendmail, httpd.conf, or crontab changes, and doesn’t copy the web server folders or any custom installations of PHP. And the tricky part is that a lot of those settings and files are in directories that are invisible to the Finder, and you have to use the Unix Terminal to modify or mhttp://www.limmy.com/playthings/xylophone/ove them...

Bet on the bird

Tux Fights Bux for the Soul of India is the title and subject of my latest SuitWatch newsletter, now up on the Linux Journal site.

Paneling

From left to right, Aaron Swartz, me, Doug Barcon and Mary Wehmeier. Mary and Doug were up to Comdex from L.A. today, and on hand for the panel that featured Aaron and me. When he was introducing us, Gary Beach, the moderator, said he believed Aaron beat Bill Gates' record as the youngest speaker in Comdex history. Bill was 17, and Aaron has that beat by a year.

We took that pic at an after-hours press gathering, with an inexpensive camera a company was showing off.