Status-Q

Today the BBC announced that they are providing RSS feeds that can be used with all the popular news aggregators including our own Radio UserLand. [from Scripting News] Well done, Auntie!

Rose & I agreed there could be few things we would like to watch less than hours of analysis and dredging up of old emotions one year on from 9/11.

But almost at the same time we’re going to have the only thing that could come close for awfulness: it’s 5 years on from the death of Princess Diana. I think the TV can stay firmly switched off for a couple of weeks…

[Original Link] A very interesting and important interview cited recently on Slashdot. Nominally about KDE, it covers much larger issues in a compelling and powerful way:.

“…We are steadily heading to a future in which the control of humanity’s intellectual property – works of art, multimedia, ideas, writings, etc. – is so vested in software vendor(s) that it is fair to say that the average user of a proprietary desktop will eventually no longer “own”, in the traditional sense of the word, his or her own electronic creations. In other words, the products of our creative minds, the very essence of our humanity, are being relentlessly stripped from us.

If you use a proprietary OS to make a video or audio track, or to write a research paper, and save it in one of the default proprietary electronic data formats, you might soon find yourself actually paying someone else run-time and/or license renewal fees just to access your own creations. Not to mention any charges that may apply to distributing copies to others (whether directly or because the recipient must also pay similar runtime or recurring fees to access the data). You tell me, when you have to pay one particular vendor money every time you or someone else views a movie you created, who owns the movie? …”

[Original Link] Steve Jobs thinks so. But is he building an Apple replacement?

A year ago yesterday, I linked to Dave Wilson’s LA Times article entitled “Windows, Windows, everywhere”, which talked about how the homogeneity caused by a worldwide subscription licensing scheme would cause viruses to have a more devastating effect since everyone would have the same vulnerabilities.

I went back to look at it today, and it’s not there. The link doesn’t work any more and there’s no helpful message to tell me where I might find it. It may be in the archives and available for a fee, but when I found the archives I still couldn’t find the article. This makes me much less likely to link to the LA Times in future. Is it really worth it for them?

Here’s a post from the exhibition floor at LinuxWorld. I ran MacStumbler here and picked up something like 40 wireless access points. This comes to you through one of them. I’ve no idea whose it is, but I’m grateful…

[Original Link] A splendid geeky story about car-to-car communication.

[Original Link] “Hollywood is winning, folks. You are losing. And you’d better start caring.”