Category: Posts from Radio

Borland Backs Down [Slashdot]

Borland has dropped their absurd license wherein they gave themselves permission to poke around customers’ computers. I guess they finally figured out that if they went ahead, they wouldn’t have any customers to spy on.

‘American Taleban’ to face civil trial. American Taleban member John Walker Lindh is to be handed over to the
US Justice Department to face a charge of aiding terrorism. [BBC News: world]

bq. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

US Constitution, Article 3, Section 3

Murder at Rainbow Farm. Grover Crosslin and Rolland Rohm were murdered. They were murdered by cops just following orders, by lawmakers who put evil statutes on the books, and by a mealy mouthed prosecutor named Scott Teeter who tried to excuse the bloody mess. [About.com: Civil Liberties]

Lawyers, lawyers, and (yes) more lawyers on Borland flap [Politech]

Borland’s new license gives them the power to invade your home or business looking for pirated copies of their software. Theoretically this is to prevent people from using more copies than they payed for. However, it seems to me that it’s counterproductive even without the privacy concerns.

If someone is going to pirate Borland software with this license, they are better off pirating all of their copies instead of only some. If they do that then they never agreed to the license, because they never payed for any legal copies, and if Borland wants to go after them they have to get a warrant.

A Flat, Flat, Flat Screen World. With Apple leading the way, flat screens are set to replace traditional monitors for good. ‘In the next two years every major player will market an all-in-one flat panel (computer system),’ says one analyst. By Jeffrey Benner. [Wired News]

Although flat screens are becoming more popular, they won’t replace CRTs completely because of the color shift problem. Look at an LCD monitor, then move your head three inches and notice how all the colors look a little different. For people who work with photographs and video, this is unacceptable–the colors must be accurate at all times. Ironically, Macs are very popular among such people because of ColorSync.

John Rhodes wrote an in-depth description of his painful experience installing Norton AntiVirus 2002. Ouch. All I can say is, the Mac version is much better!

Here’s an Introduction to RSS which provides the best explanation of why RSS is a good thing that I could find. It’s a bit light on the “how” though. Fortunately, the same site also has an article on Creating RSS files for your Web site.

I found a useful alternative to an “RSS evangelism” site. Create RSS channels from HTML news sites [perl.com] explains how to produce your own RSS feed from somebody else’s HTML using Perl. It is usually better to do things for yourself than try to get someone else to do them, after all.

I’m looking for a site with a nice clear explanation of what RSS is, why it’s a good thing, and how RSS files work. If I can find such a site, I can use it to help me convince web sites to add support–or so I hope. I could write a simple “why I want it” sort of explanation myself, but I don’t have the knowledge to explain the “how.”

How I learned to stop worrying, and abandoned Mac OSX [The Register ]: “It’s the User Interface, Stupid.”

I completely agree with this. I use OS X on a daily basis at my job testing Mac software, and I despise it. I will continue to use the Mac OS for any “administrative” tasks and on my personal systems, but if I had to chose between OS X and Windows, I would chose Windows. It’s actually more reliable and easier to use than OS X.

Of course, my favorite computer is my Newton MessagePad 2100, so I’m used to using an “obsolete” OS that is superior to the newer OSes.