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Wednesday, March 6, 2002
I don't know about you, but I'm relieved. 
| | Says here Amazon and Barnes & Noble settled their patent spat. |
Archival Googlebomb
After awhile it all starts to add up
If your baby doesn't fit in the overhead compartment, sir, we'll be glad to check it for you
Fucknozzle Fusion
| | I can't explain it, and there's no point to it when you're just one click away from The Original: Way.Nu. So put your mice together and give it up for... |
Yes, France has fallen
N Day
| | I'm serious. Let's do it. We'll stop at real-life markets along the way (farmers, I'm thinking) netcast it live, get some kick-ass performers to put on some righteous in-the-bazaar entertainment, and pay them straight from the hat, right on the spot. |
| | When we get there it'll be the Million Customer March. We'll flush those creeps through the pipes they flowed in through. |
Lookin' Blue
| | I paused whie making coffee yesterday afternoon to catch the last few minutes of the Duke-Virginia game. Duke was up 12. But then Virginia went on a 21-1 rally and Duke quit playing team ball. Worse, they shot fouls like Shaq, and finally lost, 87-84. |
| | My money's on Maryland in the NCAA's. Duke might make the Final Four on talent alone (and passing — they're terrific at that). But they won't win the Big One without foul shooting. Hope they do, but I'm not holding my breath. |
It's time to show these fuckers what Democracy is all about
| | The copyright office has issued a ruling under the DMCA that will shut down Internet radio for all but the huge corporations which never gave a shit about it anyway. More about the matter here, here, here, here, here and here. |
| | Even if you don't listen to Internet radio, chances are you've noticed that radio of the old-fashioned sort has been homogenized to death. If you haven't stopped listening, you've probably stopped caring. |
| | But in fact, Internet radio flat-out rocks. It's what old-fashioned free-form FM was at its seminal best back inthe '60s and '70s, cubed. What's more, it's able to list and archive exactly what's playing, which means it's in a perfect position to cause sales of those tunes, and to share revenues with artists in a real market environment. |
| | Which means Internet radio is in a perfect position to threaten the vast entertainment production and distribution system that considers its products "content" and its customers "consumers." These producers haven't just been trying to use Congress as an instrument for turning the Net into yet another set of pipes in their world wide plumbing system. They've been succeeding. The DMCA was just one step. How long before we have to pay to put up a link or a quote? Don't laugh. That's pretty much what the DMCA does to Internet radio. |
| | We face a plain conceptual choice here. Either the Net is a medium — a plumbing system of pipes for pumping content from producers to consumers, controlled from top to bottom by suppliers — or it's a place where people and companies meet to make culture, do business and share the stuff that makes life interesting. |
| | In other words, it's an entertainment plumbing system, or it's a market. |
| | What President Bush said about terrorism now applies to the war on markets by giant entertainment producers and their allies in Congress. Either you're with markets or against them. |
| | To help make the distinction clear, substitute "people" for "markets." We're talking about the same thing here. |
| | The DMCA outlawed the market. It confuses monopoly with business and control with demand. It's deeply fucked, and it's time to tear that sucker down. |
| | March on Washington, anyone? I'm not kidding. |
Skiing would have been more fun
| | I woke up yesterday morning with what felt like a torn shoulder muscle, and it only got worse all day. Now I can hardly move it. How does shit like that happen when you're sleeping? |
Hell hath no fury like a columnist scorned
| | Dan lays into Connectix over its problems with Virtual PC. For what it's worth, my experience is similar. The best-performing Virtual PC in my own coterie of machines here is Version 3 running Windows 95 on a 333MHz PowerMac that now belongs to my kid. He uses it ro run Windows games, mostly. It rocks. VPC 5 on both the Titanium and the Dual 500 G4 desktop (running Win 2000 in both cases) is so tubby it verges on useless. On the upside, I've had none of the crashing problems Dan reports. |
Fear and fun
| | Meanwhile, in the same household, Judith gets a laugh out of one of TV's mysteries. Back in their Novell days, Judith was even scarier than Craig. |
On the day before the instant, no less
| | Looks pretty damn smart to me. Also right on. |
| | The only thing I would add is that pretty much everything we know about instant messaging so far has approximately zero to do with The Web. It may run on The Net, but only on servers owned by Microsoft and AOL, which have both done their level best not to interoperate with each other, and to prevent their free clients from doing the same. It's deeply retro and sucky stuff. |
| | What we call The Web is a bunch of servers. Most of them are Apache, a lot of them are Microsoft IIS, and the rest are of varied provenance. What matters is that anybody can set up a Web server (there's even a switch you can throw in our operating system to make your PC a Web server). Anybody can set up a mail server too. You can buy a Cobalt Qube and set up both throuh a browser interface. But the same is not yet the case for instant messaging. Jabber has made a good start; but it's still a long way from critical mass. |
| | My point: Instant messaging is still at the same evolutionary stage as the Internet was when only a relatively few geeks were smart enough, or located fortuitously enough, to use it. AOL's, Microsoft's and Yahoo's instant messaging systems today are historical equivalents of Compuserve, Prodigy and, um, AOL — when all three were online services. In other words, utterly closed and non-interoperable. |
| | We won't begin to see all the glorious possibilities of instant mesaging until it becomes as much a part of the Internet's own wide-open operating system as Web and email servicess. Until then, what we have is just a sampling. |
Looks like too much fun
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