The movie and music industries are both madly sueing people over DVD and mp3 issues. It smells like greed. We’ve put together some key links and summarized it here According to a BBC report, China may try to launch a manned space flight 5 February to mark the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. They are two major studies on HIV and AIDS that have just been released. The one getting the press used computer modelling to say the virus made the jump to humans in the 1930’s. The more practical one confirms that oral sex can transmit HIV and is responsible for about 8 percent of recent infections. If you liked the gallery of photos of the new millenium we pointed to recently, you’ll also be interested in another one that presents QuickTime VR panoramas from around the world on New Year’s day. You’ll need QuickTime 4 –which is only available for Windows and Mac– but they provide a link to get it. Waiting for Apple to announce 500+Mhz Macs? Don’t hold your breath. According to an article at Apple Insider it’s "a fair assumption" that the G4 line won’t exceed 500MHz until the Fall. But, the 550 and 600MHz versions of the G3 are expected in the month, according to monday’s Mac OS Rumors. But, even with the advantages of the G3/G4 architecture, the 200MHz gap between those chips and AMD and Intel’s latest offerings is cause for concern. If you live in the Dallas Fort Worth … Continue reading 2000-02-03 →

Yesterday, John McCain beat George the Second by 18 points –getting 50% more of the vote than the favorite son– in the New Hampshire Primary –impressive in a field of six candidates. On the Democratic side, Gore edged Bradley by only five points. Coverage: BBC, CNN The stories been floating around the edges of the media for some time. Republican Governor George Ryan has been considering a morratoreum on Illinois Death Row executions. It was announced yesterday. Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Since then it has executed 12. In the same period, 13 Death Row inmates have been freed. More people have been wrongly convicted than have been executed. Governor Ryan says he will order a thorough review of court procedures in such cases. The only similar attempt was vetoed by Nebraska’s Governor last year. In general the US obssession with the death penalty is striking. The public overwhelmingly supports it. 38 states and the Federal Government have the Death Penalty. But, Canada, Mexico and most of the industrial and post-industrial world have done away with it. Unfortunately, if you check out the message boards associated with the last story, you quickly find out that the rhetoric from people on both sides of this isssue leaves something to be desired. You can almost hear the knuckles scrapping. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

If you’ve been waiting for us to say something about the recent DVD and mp3 legal developments, don’t worry. It’s coming in the next day or so. Author Kurt Vonnegot is in critical condition after a fire at his New York home Sunday evening. Vonnegut is the author of a string of books including Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. He’s one of a small number of living authors that has achieved not only popular success, but who’s work also part of the canon, showing up regularly in classes and on tests to get in Graduate programs in Literature. You can find out more about him, his books and his art at thE vOnnEgUt wEb (at Duke University) and vonnegot.com. OS Opinion has some interesting thoughts on Apple’s OS 9 and iDisk becoming the basis for the first widely accepted network computer. Interestingly enough it’s fairly similar to what Steve Jobs already does personally… Today’s Cam World has an excellent critique of newmedia.com. The core problem newmedia.com –and any of a number of other websites– has is that they assume everyone is running Internet Explorer 5 on windows. With the top selling computers at retail both being Macs and the rapid growth of Linux, that’s a bad assumption. It’s along the lines of a shop owner only selling to men wearing polo shirts. If you were owned a store would you tell most of your customers they can’t come in? One of the joys of being on a network is trying to … Continue reading author (inter)net →

One of the things that the end of the 20th century has done has been to start raising the question of what happened to the drive into space. Shuttle Endeavor is scheduled for lift-off later today, but you wouldn’t know that by listening to the national press. More to the point, what about men travelling beyond earth orbit again. It’s been almost 30 years since the Apollo program was unceremoniously canned. People were complained that launch coverage cut into their sit coms. The networks cut the coverage and the last three moonshots never happened. What may be the best recent piece by Political Cartoonist David Horsey sumarizes it perfectly: We’ve lost our will. When the Mars Polar Lander disappeared, there was moaning about the $165M lost. Of course no one mentioned that more is spent by Hollywood to make a flop like Waterworld. Have we gotten to the point that no one bats an eye at high-budget movie flops, but we worry about the small amount of money we’re spending to "explore". The Weekly Standard has a must-read on the topic. If you travel frequently, you might be interested in a series of city guides osinga.com is developing. Currently they’ve only got a few available, but they’ve got a large staff and the guides are free. Speaking of traveling, it’s time for the Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time with a blast from a cult favorite of the past. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Earth Edition) is now online. … Continue reading Travel →

We don’t normally link to sites that require you to sign up, but we’ll make an exception in this case. The New York Times created a photo essay about the New Millenium. Any number of major cities –Chicago, Dallas, Houston for instance– were left out and you may have to click your back button here and there to see all the photos, but the photos do a great job of covering the event ranging from the spectacular fireworks and light shows around the world to the people stuck working at NORAD and in parking lots. One of the best local bands in Dallas right now is Gropius. If you follow the band, there’s a photo gallery of their performance friday available at Tim Wood’s 4 til 7. If you’ve every wanted to big on something at Sotheby’s, you’ve now got your chance. Sotheby’s has gone online and The Economist has an article on the site and arch-rival Christie’s has a site also. Now, if someone would just give me the money to buy that Magritte I’m eyeing. Pity there’s nothing by Jenny Holtzer up… Speaking of Jennies… Emode.com has one of the silly exercises where men can answer questions and they get matched with a celebrity female. It’s stupid but ego-soothing to have say Jennifer Lopez as the result. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

The first State of the Union speech and Thursday’s State of the Union speech are available to read online. The Washinton Post has an overview of how Clinton’s State of the Union speeches compare. Interesting stuff. There are any numbers of sneaky ways to pull info out of poorly designed e-commerce sites. We covered the stupid database designer one last week. This week it’s Outpost.com’s "let's put the order number in the URL" trick. It seems if you change the order number, you can see the guts of someone else’s order. Coverage: Wired. Web Review has an article on building a really cheap webserver. They’ve come to the almost the same conclusion we have: if you’re just starting and you want something easy to learn and dependable, go with an older Mac. They recommend specific machines and show how to install linux on them. Another alternative is to leave the machine running the Mac OS. There are any number of good free and nearly free programs to serve pages, handle mail, serve lists and more. Check out Versiontracker. Start there and keep that article around for the step to Linux. Time for a follow-up. The Wall Street Journal article on Davos we mentioned earlier in the week is available at MSNBC. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

An Australian domain name registry plans to start registering domain names in Chinesse and other languagues besides English. Got a website targeted to the People’s Republic? These guys may be your answer. Coverage: Fairfax IT. Egypt is not known as a ground-breaker in art. Recently a gallery in Cairo posted a show of photos of working people in a nearby alley. According to the artist the point of the show is about working people as heroes. But, the shows are controversial because of the political statements people are reading into the work. Art is as much in the eye –and mind– of the beholder as in the mind of the artist. Speaking of controversial art, PBS will be airing a 90 minute piece on controversial books, film and art next Wednesday. It used to be that vanity in Rock and Roll was thinking the song was about you. . Well, it seems that it now requires trademarking your name. Mick Jagger is trying to join a list of mature rockers like Billy Joel who’ve trademarked their names. So, if some other Mrs. Jagger named her kid Mick, will the big Mick sue the little Mick for trademark infringement? Will we get sued for printing his name? The possibilities boggle the mind. In 2001: A Space Oddysey and the sequels (one movie, several books), there is life on one of Jupiter’s moons. Well, in one of those weird moments where fiction anticipates reality, Scientists believe that there may be life on … Continue reading 2000-01-28 →

Well, here in Dallas, the highs have mostly stayed in 70’s and 80’s all "winter" long. Last week those highs dropped into the ’50s and over the course of last night we went from rain to freezing rain and thus the picture (click to zoom). Despite appearances that’s not snow. For Dallas, snow seems to be require a special dispensation and is only granted every third or fourth year. We’ve added news feeds courtesy of moreover.com. The categories include top news, arts, linux, telecommunications and computer security. Click on other news at the right to take a gander. It’s a little slow to load at the moment –lots of news– but we’ll be doing some nifty stuff to it soon to make it faster. When I checked it moments ago, there were articles on the State of the Union speech, Mick Jagger trying to trademark his name, multiple articles on the donation of the Zapruder film to the JFK museum in Dallas, a laundry list of Nortel Networks news and a science article on the idea that there are only six degrees of seperation between any two people on the planet. Some of the more interesting stuff will end up getting summarized over here. If you don’t know, Mozilla is the code-word for the project that, among other things, is developing the next version of Netscape. Late yesterday, Mozilla’s alpha version M13 was released. Not only has Transmeta joined the intel-compatible processor war, but VIA –a Korean manufacturer of logic … Continue reading great sheeets of ice! →

The first color Palm handheld should surface soon. A 2 February developer event will include preliminary versions of the device. Left hanging in the air is the question of who will sell the device. Rumors seem to lean towards Palm itself or Apple, but all we know for sure is that it’s one of the Palm licenses, a growing list that also includes IBM and Visor. According to one report a color Palm IIIc is already in CompUSA’s inventory. Following the Clinton administration’s limited relaxation on encryption exports, another major gain is coming our way. RSA’s patent on public key encryption will expire in September.. Hopefully this will lead to public key encryption becoming the defacto standard for many forms of communications, such as email. For quite a while, there have been rumblings from the US Postal Service about adding internet services. They appear to be getting serious with talk of all sorts of new services. The most interesting is an email address for every physical address in the country. Which begs the question: would you trust the post office with your email? If you were wondering who the four music giants will be after the Warner/EMI merger, they’ll be: Warner/EMI (US), Seagrams (Canada), Sony (Japan), BMG (Germany) Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

The weekends are usually slow for news, but not always. Saturday, Ecuador’s miltary called for President Jamil Mahuad to step down. By the evening, Ecuador’s military declared a Coup. The Junta was composed of General Carlos Mendoza, an indigenous (indian) leader and a former Justice of the Ecuador Supreme Court. Within hours General Mendoza had resigned from the Junta; aparently under pressure from the US. By early afternoon Sunday, Vice President Noboa had taken power with the backing of the military and the parliment. The BBC has excellant coverage of events: 1, 2, 3, 4. The AOL-Time Warner deal has only just slipped off the news radar and Time Warner is in talks to merge musics group with EMI, reducing the number of major music labels to four. Coverage: CNNfn and BBC If you’re really into computers, you might check out the comparison of the AMD Athlon and Motorolla G4 over at Ars Technica. Halfway Oregon has changed it’s name to Half.com –at least for the next year– in a stunt to promote the online retailer surprise half.com. In return, the town will get a $100,000+ worth of computer equipment along with other goodies. Coverage: ZD Net. And, once again, it’s time for the Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time. This means wasting time in often humorous and ironic pursuits. And this week is no exception. Have you ever wanted a fancy, academic justification for slacking on the job? The top of your browser will say Mooreslaw. The longer title is … Continue reading TKOs, Hype, HCWT →