Thursday, December 26, 2002

Live free

From 6-7pm PST tonight I'm on The Linux Show, doing a year-end wrap up with the crew there, plus a bevy of fellow Linux journalists. It's happening now, and we're having fun. Tune in.

Up the A-creek

Then I ran across this public note from David Williams. Clearly a screw-up on Amazon's part.

I was gonna blog something today about how Amazon still defined the high water mark of on-line retail do-it-rightness, given my own experience with various OL retailers this holiday season. Case in point: delivering a DVD player as a present to a family member just in time for Christmas. Amazon handled the whole thing without a hitch.

Year End Whap-up

Peter Lewis in Fortune: Worst of 2002: With Any Luck, It Won't Work. It begins...

What was the worst technology product of the year? There are so many deserving choices, mostly related to clumsy efforts by media companies and their lawyers to restrict the public's enjoyment of digital movies and music.

But in terms of potential impact on our lives, the Worst of 2002 award goes to TIA, the Total Information Awareness program, spawned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Awareness Office. TIA is exploring the feasibility of developing a national surveillance system intended to identify potential terrorists and criminals through "data mining" of the public and private electronic records of every citizen.

Here's his Best of 2002 column from the week before.

Annopundit

Glenn Reynolds in TCS: Year of the Blog.

The Debate, cont'd

Hamish MacEwan weighs in with a very thoughtful post on the NEA thing.

Meanwhile, ELN is continuing to publicly author and edit his own understanding of the issues.

More from Dave Feasey (responding to Hamish), me, Mitch, Dr. Weinberger (here too), and AKMA. Three links back, DW sez this:

Doc is waxing wise in his response to Eric, although I think that in Doc's terms I don't want identity services to be "Net native." I want them on the edge. I suspect Doc does, too, and we're disagreeing only verbally.

Agreed. One of the neat things about Craig Burton's description of the Net as a big hollow sphere (for more about that see here, here, and various other links here) is that it's all edge. So by "Net native" I mean edgy in the Xtreme.

Blog wider

Joi is releasing his moblog script under a GPL license. He explains:

I've been getting a lot of attention for my moblog even though it's not such a big technical feat really. All you need is a script to convert email into MT entires. We're going to make the code available so that hopefully more people can experiment with moblogging. It's being made available under a standard GPL v.2 license. Please let me know what you think. We hope to continue to improve it.... Also, since it uses XML-RPC, it should be easy to get it to work with other blog platforms.

Only 340 shopping days until Chrismukah

Making the rounds: Clear Channel Entertainment Purchases Christmas and Hunukkah — Will Merge the Holidays. A sample:

While details were not available at press time, it is believed that the overhead cost of having twelve days of Christmas and eight days of Hanukkah was becoming prohibitive. Clear Channel executives felt that this new consolidation could result in significant cost savings and profit opportunities for the company and offer a substantial benefit to it's worldwide customer base.

Thanks to Dean for the pointer.