An imaginary place in a reactionary time
Will the Intel Macs boot into target mode?
Will there be a fat (dual binary) release of OS X, and will I be able to boot from a PPC mac in target mode?
Will the boot key sequences still work? (IE, will verbose boot mode work, can I zap PRAM, reset the PMU etc, etc.)
Google Video doesn’t run on the Mac.
Rumor has it that Jorn Barger is homeless in San Francisco. Concerned individuals are asked to contribute via Jorn’s blog, Robot Wisdom. Jorn is famous for his erratic behavior, irritating opinions, and invention of the term weblog.
Even better, how about donating something to Howard Lovey? Howard went broke providing a useful news source for the world, without a tad of crypto hate mongering.
The decision itself.
While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world’s a big place. They make software there too.
Yesterday the Supreme Court made a narrow judgement on copyright liability. As Thomas C Greene reported, the Court affirmed the obvious, and bounced the issue back down to the lower courts, where it will be fought all over again. By doing so, the Judges were stating that the two sides are quite capable of sorting this matter out between them, that the established precedents need not be revisited (for example, Sony v Universal) and that the wisdom of their judgement will be called upon another day. Now get snappy. But the professional pundits and their pyjama-clad reflections in the “blogosphere” had been anxiously waiting for the Supremes’ verdict for a week, with their explosive editorials primed and ready. And off they went, like lab monkeys on meths sniffing fresh air for the first time.
Deja Vu all over again: the Register reports:
Police seized a server used by Indymedia, the independent newsgathering collective, from the Bristol home of a member of the group after issuing a search warrant on Monday. The raid is the second time within the last year that an Indymedia server has been seized in the UK.
Officers also took the unnamed Bristol collective member in for questioning, and seized a PC, in an incident that has already provoked a huge row. The action happened despite the intervention on Indymedia’s behalf by justice group Liberty whose lawyers advised police that the server was “considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law”. Police had sought access to the server in order to gain access to logs about a posting related to an attack on a freight train that caused a reported £100,000 in damage.
Organic cotton tee shirts in bulk, with special pricing for not for profits and screen printers. Variety of colors, 2 types of weave, from Patagonia of all places.
Illegal file sharing may have saved the pilot of the Warren Ellis TV series Global Frequency:
A sacked TV pilot about a large number of people who stay in touch through an underground data network has popped up on … well, an underground data network.
[snip]
Whether all the internet buzz ultimately revives the show, Rogers said he has learned much from the leak and about the power of the internet.
“It changes the way I’ll do my next project,” said Rogers. If he owned the full rights, he said, “I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set.” He urged other creators to do the same.
“It’s a model and a reminder to the next guy who comes along,” he said.
George Lucas says the Blockbuster movie is dead.
Markoff at The NYTimes wakes up and smells the coffee:
Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content – which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites – is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.
The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.
First there’s the subscribe to tags feature. Lets you subscribe to Flickr, Technorati, and Del.icio.us tags. Wish I’d known about this last week.
Search Engines! You can subscribe to searches on Findory, Blogdigger, Daypop, Feedster, and Yahoo.
Scripts! you can subscribe to scripts! Very powerful and cool. Here’s a list of scripts, most of which are traditional plugins, but there are some todo list ticklers and other coolness.
Still more tips here. including my new favorite, view tagged items.
I mentioned search engine subscriptions in a previous post when talking about tag subscriptions. Here’s the help page on it. This is another of my personal favorite features since I can get news on topics that interest me without having to subscribe to every feed in the entire blogosphere.
When you combine search engine subscriptions, tag subscriptions, and smart lists, you can do some powerful things. Keeping up doesn’t have to mean subscribing to every single potentially interesting feed.
There is a strong business use here: for instance, we like to get feedback from people about our software. Often they post on their weblogs. Well, we can’t subscribe to every weblog everywhere, but by using search engine and tag subscriptions and smart lists we still see the feedback when it’s posted, wherever it is. It helps us, as a company, as developers, to be able to listen, which is our main job.
The new version of iTunes and the convergence of iPod models is huge news. Not for the obvious reasons of Halo effect, market share, bang for buck or branding. Apple has sanctified Podcasts, much like they did the GUI and Intel’s USB (with the iMac). Market share or not, everyone sits up and takes notice when Apple announces. And this time they’ve announced on your side.
Because it means you now own the airwaves. Forget the Grokster case for a minute, forget Clearchannel and Infinity. Forget about teh Broadcast Flag keeping you from recording your favorite TV show. Listen to this Podcast from the Gnomedex conference by Adam Curry, and this one for historical background. Remember you don’t need any special gear to get or listen to Podcasts. The new version of iTunes with Podcasting support and all the other podcatchers and news aggregators are just Tivo for the MP3 files. Your browser should already know how to hand off to your MP3 player–if it doesn’t, right click and save the file then either double click on it or drag it into your MP3 player. (Curry’s site is getting hammered this could take a while, be patient.)
This is your future. News and music when you want it, made by you and your friends. playable wherever. Curry’s allusion to Woodstock is apt. The personal computer did change the world, and it’s not done yet. This is what the Grokster case is really about, it has nothing to do with piracy, it’s about trying to stuff the genii of Peer to Peer networking back in the bottle before everyone starts distributing their own content without Hollywood and the big Media companies. It’s what they did to DAT in Amerika.
Yes, there are ways to make money at this. Curry has his Podshow company, there are other players out there too, with other plays. Apple is already set up to charge.
In November M$ will stop supporting standards based email in favor of their Sender ID spam stopping scheme. I’m jumping the gun, and removing all MSN, Hotmail and other M$ domains from my email addressbook. Sorry, but if they reject standards based solutions and demand I register with them to send you email, you’re not getting my email. Get a free account with Yahoo, SpyMac, Excite or Gmail. Or shell out the money to get a account with a real Internet Service Provider, like Speakeasy or Earthlink. Or just bah like a sheep.
If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message.
Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID, he said.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, a standard-setting body, dissolved a working group on Sender ID in September. Still, Microsoft is plowing ahead with Sender ID, perhaps in a last-ditch effort to make good on a promise by Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates to can spam by 2006.
