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No frills tech news aggregator.
Mourning Sir Alec Guinness the Rasterweb way:
"The day was marred only by the loss of Obi-wan... sigh... Obi-wan said it best when he told Han: 'Let's just say we'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements.' How true! A good Jedi, a good friend. The report says 'The spokesman could not confirm the cause of death.' Um, gee, I'm pretty sure Darth Vader killed him, hello???"
If consumers are getting their music for free now, I guess the government decided they can get something out of the record industry too. The BBC reports:
"State attorneys from 28 US states have filed a law suit against the world's five largest record companies, accusing them of fixing compact disc prices.... The attorneys have filed suit against Time Warner's Warner Brothers music group, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, and EMI.... The states are demanding damages running into 'hundreds of millions of dollars', or 'several dollars' per CD sold."I can't wait to hear what they will propose to do with the money. Programs to keep kids off gangsta rap? Free Britney Spears CDs for low income families? Isn't the market speaking loudly enough on this one?
The latest Mozilla (M17) is available for download. I'm grabing it now, but my net connection has been so slow and unreliable the past few days I'm not sure I'll get it. Netscape has also released M17, under the name Netscape Communciator 6.0 PR2 (Preview Release 2.) I'm just going to report back on Mozilla though. I'm still very behind this project (I mean spiritually or something, I'm not actually helping in any way.) But I don't have very high expectations. Lots of fighting lately, especially since the WSP published that scathing aritcle blasting Netscape for the slow progress of Mozilla (and demanding they take Netscape 4.x off the market.) Suck got into the action with their own brand of software review (i.e., lots of quips, not many facts.) Then Monty Manley wrote What went wrong with Mozilla, to which everybody and their brother on the Moz side replied (see Mike Cornall's There is nothing wrong with Mozilla in Linux Today as well.) Back and forth. The bickering is getting worse. If only the product were getting better. We'll see. At least you can play Pac-Man on it - take that IE. And surprisingly, my connection to ftp.mozilla.org is rocking. It's almost half down since I started this little blurb. Check back for the results.
Amazing satelite image of the lights of Europe. 300K and well worth the trip. For some reason that picture gets me all choked up. Our technological ambitions are breathtaking. Oh no wait, I just had my collar too tight.
Great dinner at Lupa last night (Thompson, north of Houston.) They can cook pasta. Not sure what got into me (barbara d'alba -> rofosco, maybe,) but I started arguing, a bit too loudly, my not too well reasoned "political decentralization as a prelude to space colonization" rant. Anyway, apologies to my friends who have probably heard this too many times. I'll try to take it down a notch.
Here's an article on filtering adds out of your web surfing experience (on linux, windows, BEos, and Mac.) I've downloaded their files, but am not terribly impressed yet. Perhaps I'm still doing something wrong. Wired is the only site I can find that it seems to work on. I'll report back if I get it working well. Would be great to have this ability. If anyone tries it on Windows, let me know.
Here's the camera for Alex if anybody feels like funding the Arboretum to the tune of $1300. Check out the zoom.
This could be the worst hole yet. Java security hole makes Netscape into a web server. This is not good. If you run Netscape (on any platform) your entire filesystem (that's every file on your computer) may be viewable/downloadable to others on the net. Seems like a problem with java (not javascript, but java,) as well as a problem with Netscape's (poorly written) code. TURN JAVA OFF. (I always keep it off, but that was just paranoid; now it's mandatory.) Turn javascript off too, although nothing this big has ever been found in javascript (plus lots of sites use it so it's more of a pain - although I have it off.) You can do this in the preferences in Netscape (under 'advanced'.) Perhaps this will turn out to be a hoax and/or not so bad as it seems, but I seriously doubt it. I think this is real, and it pretty much spells the end for Netscape. I'm switching to icab.
Wow. I just found out that you can create and control Flash movies from inside PHP. It's cool not to like Flash, and indeed I don't like the proprietary nature of the technology, but for some things there is just no other tool. Sure Flash is abused, but also there is cool stuff done with it. Like any tool, much rests on the good judgement of the operator. But dynamic flash? Web front ends for flash creation? Almost anything would be possible. Interesting. Too bad you need PHP 4 installed. Eventually I'll upgrade, and then we'll see what we can do. Maybe there will be more than text and the occasional picture on the site.