by Mike Shea on 2 September 2003
The article, Lone file-swapper takes on recording industry has my favorite quote of the day:
The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods -- good old-fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush.
Seaking of Orwellian logic, Edward Tufte has a short Wired version of his mail-order booklet, the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. The article is called Powerpoint is Evil. For any typical corporate beurocrat looking to break free of the chains of pointless meetings, this is a must read.
Matt got me using My Yahoo again. It's a giant corporate-based glossy custom homepage that probably filters just enough information to control my thoughts, but it is pretty handy. If you mix that with Bloglines you can have all of your above ground and underground news on two pages.
Yahoo has also now released Yahoo News RSS Feeds for their news aggrigation service. They work very well in the Merovingian as shown in this World News example. Now that Yahoo is separating itself from Google by buying Inktomi there is going to be a search engine war. Google holds the belt right now, but with these great Yahoo services, they may end up knocking out the champ.
I've been dorking around with my stats a lot and found a new evil use for my automated newsfeeds. Someone's using my Google News feed script to stalk Angelina Jolie.
Wired has two interesting bits on Apple's strange success and Online Gaming. The online gaming article seems to forget a couple of rules that gaming manufacturers have forgotten long ago. You cannot expect any accessory to breach more than 10% of your total install base. That means online games can only expect to hit 10% of the consoles. This is the reason EQ Online Adventures hasn't done that well. Game systems needed to include online play with the purchase of the console. Even though Sony now includes a network adapter with their system they have already reached global saturation at 50 million consoles. The only hope for the success of online games is the release of the next console with free online play included.
