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Friday, July 18, 2003 |
The vendetta's victim. Government shaken by apparent suicide of Whitehall scientist Dr David Kelly. [Guardian Unlimited]
RIP Dr. David Kelly. Occasionally history reports back similar stories of individuals who get swept up into political turmoil and are destroyed in one way or another. All these high level actors, media spotlights blazing politicians bucking for attention and acclaim feeling really self-empowered, egos brimming over and they get to go after a little guy. It's like Sen. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, the Pesi-Cola kid, trying to make a name for himself hauling people into his committee for questioning. when will it ever stop?
8:45:32 PM 
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Banzai sparks US protests. An Asian-American pressure group says Channel 4's show Banzai is demeaning, following its US debut. [BBC News | Entertainment | TV and Radio | UK Edition]
From what I've seen on such hack journalistic venues like "Entertainment Tonight" and "Extra", the Japanese do have a lot of very intense game shows that they run every day. Stuff like that in cases looks way more dangerous than NBC crap like Fear Factor. So, there's no denying Fox is capitalizing on something that exists, but those filler sections with they guy shouting Bonzai over and over, it's just too goofy and I can see Asian-Americans taking exception at that. It's just too stupid and unnecessary.
8:19:39 PM
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Reporters Notebook: A Macworld smackdown. One of the highlights of this week for me has been covering the Quark-Adobe skirmishes regarding QuarkXPress 6.0 and InDesign 2.0. I think a big draw would have been a WWF "Smackdown" event pitting Peder Engrob, the worldwide product evangelist for Adobe InDesign, against Jurgen Kurz, Quark's vice president of product management. In fact, I think IDG should add "rasslin' " (not wrestling, which is a legitimate high school/college sport) to future Macworld expos. Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates? Phil Schiller vs. Steve Ballmer? I'd pay good money for those match-ups and I'll bet others would, as well. [MacCentral]
Mr. Sellers does a good job capturing the slice of life you get from attending tradeshows or for me personally conferences. Occasionally you do really meet kewl people who know what they are talking about. If I wasn't so shy, I'd probably meet a lot more of them. But sounds like Mr. Sellers made out pretty well and filed some good stories on behalf of one of my more favorite Mac News websites: MacCentral.
8:15:13 PM
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Macworld CreativePro: Toast 6 Titanium sneak peek. Although Roxio Inc. chose to sit out exhibiting at this week's Macworld CreativePro Conference & Expo, a company representative was on-hand to provide MacCentral with a sneak peek at Toast 6 Titanium, a significant advance in the company's popular CD and DVD burning software for the Macintosh. Currently in development and expected for release in early September, Toast 6 Titanium leaves very few stones unturned in the areas of interface, features and functionality. [MacCentral]
Cool! I had thought about buying Toast 5, but I didn't think I needed it. But I've got a hankering to make Video CD's instead of burning 5 minutes worth of video onto a DVD because all I got is iDVD for that kind of thing. Looks like I'll skip 5.0 and go straight to 6.0
8:10:24 PM
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Small.biz has crap security. When is a door not a door? When it's ajar [The Register]
This may possibly be a growth sector over the next few years. When your core IT people lack certain skills, you attrition them, hire new and try to gain the new skills right? Or better yet, outsource, outsource, outsource. It's like the mantra of "Plastics!" from Mike Nichols, The Graduate. I think a lot of people are hoping and praying their Enterasys and Cisco PIX and Microsoft Proxy servers will do the trick because, after all that's all the IT staff know how to do. Buy the big brands, then hope and pray. Real security is a layered approach, and it can be done without always buying the big brand names.
8:02:07 PM
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Apple CFO Anderson joins eBay Board. eBay has announced the appointment of Apple's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Fred D. Anderson to its ... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]
First Al Gore joins Apple's board and now, Fred Anderson is joining eBay. Oh can we say interlocking directorate. Good for Fred! Does this help Apple at all,... No! Other than keeping Apple's name in the press now that MacWorld is over (which Apple didn't put much effort into other than sending in the second stringers to talk up stuff from last month).
7:58:16 PM
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BT overdoses on Cisco security fix. IOS patching goes awry [The Register]
This is slowly becoming the biggest scare thrown into IT depts. worldwide. Nobody is EVER forced to touch everyone of their routers, especially if they don't feel like touching all of them. But, a threat is a threat and when the script exploiting the bug in the IOS software was found, everyone had to take much quicker action than they had anticipated. This now has caused a cure that is worse than the threat in some ways. The effect has been that service is disrupted in a way similar to what an actual attack would have done, only it was voluntary and meant to avoid disruption. woo hoo irony rulz.
7:41:50 PM
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Debate flares over Weblog standards. Despite technical battles, Weblogs prepare to alter the collaboration and content management space [InfoWorld: Top News]
It appears Dave Weiner, owner of Userland really owned the RSS spec. This led to resentment from other parties who were championing the weblog revolution so they picked up their toys left the playground and invented their own spec and API contained under Echo, now called Atom. This article tries to lay out the ongoing activities in each camp to become the standard. But neither has became a bona fide IEEE spec. It appears Dave Weiner's announcement today of transferring ownership of RSS to Harvard's Beckman Center is an attempt to blunt criticisms from the Echo/Atom camp. So, that's why all this hubbub today about RSS, I guess.
6:47:59 PM
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No more Computer for Dell. An Inc. will do [The Register]
Believe it or not I think Apple already did this. They were Apple Computer, and now I think they are officially just Apple because they want you to associate them with their official "digital hub" campaign. Monkey see Monkey Doo-Doo. It's as if all these companies are re-arranging the deck furniture to suit their taste better.
6:05:30 PM
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E-mail? The French beg to differ. France puts its foot down on English tech-speak, banning the use of the word "e-mail" in all official correspondence in favor of a more homegrown term. [CNET News.com]
The Academie Francaise strikes again. The folks who brought you the magnetophone and steak frache are now trying to sell francophones worldwide the courriel??? Jay-sooo Kreest! What replacement are they going to come up with for the cel phone. Only time will tell.
5:59:34 PM
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Nonprofit takes hold of blog tool. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society becomes the keeper of the RSS spec, which could alleviate fears about the future of the Web log-building tool. [CNET News.com]
I'm kind of ambivalent about Dave Winer ever since Wired.com started doing all kinds coverage of him in print and online. They make him out to be a cantankerous genius like that guy that invented and owns Mathematica. However, the coolest info in this article is that my favorite writer/editor from the now nearly dead Byte magazine has joined on to help move RSS forward. Jon Udell the Internet Groupware author at O'Reilly and Dave Winer are on the board of the Berkman Center. No doubt RSS has a safe home and with those two I know the practical and techical aspects of moving forward will be maintained here's to bigger and better RSS!
5:55:39 PM
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RIAA's Flurry of Subpoenas. Lawyers for the music-industry group are sending out subpoenas as fast as they can draft them, aiming them at Internet service providers they plan to sue for failing to stop what they say is rampant music piracy. [Wired News]
Now that school is out for most Universities in the U.S. the real surveillance has begun. You can find those "Taliban" file sharers and "smoke'em out of their holes"! Sorry kiddies the P2P revolution is coming to an end, and the Reformation is on the rise. All hail the King.
5:50:46 PM
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Blogging for Bucks. Not many bloggers make money for providing links, but independent journalist Rafat Ali does. Ali publishes PaidContent, a blog-cum-newsletter, and is doing pretty well, thank you. Wired News asked him how he does it. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
I couldn't pass up an opportunity to include this article due to its self-referential nature. It's an article about a blogger and it's in my web log! Woo hoo, irony rulz! It is actually interesting that an itinerant writer is able to make any money using the web as a publishing medium. But in the end it's not he medium but the contacts you have that are all important. You cannot break stories unless you beat the bushes every day.
7:44:29 AM
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Nikon develops new image sensor. According to an article in the Japanese Nikkei, Nikon has developed a new image sensor based on a new 'LBCAST' technology (which appears to be similar to CMOS but faster). This new sensor design allows data to... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]
Looks like more fallout from the challenge of the CMOS image sensors and the wildly capable Foveon X3 technology. The press release says it's Nikon's first in house design of an image sensor. That shows some kind of panic in my eyes that Sony isn't capable of delivering the goods for the high end SLR digital cameras. A vote of no confidence if you will. Here's to Carver Mead and Foveon shaking up the nearly dead CCD and CMOS sensor designers and saying, "You can do so much better if you really tried to innovate."
7:32:27 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Eric Likness.
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