…and I still haven’t heard from the Housing department. I’m not scared. Oh no.
Not much to talk about, really. It is a Sunday, after all. Watched The Hot Rock, which was a fun heist film written by William Goldman. Also hacked Drag and Drop support into my little Blogging application, so I don't have to type links anymore. My next task is to integrate spell-checking, leading me back into the Bonobo nightmare.
I’m not sure I understand what Dave is saying here. But anyway, reasons why open source
types might like Apple (although Slashdot is always filled with anti-Apple vitriol whenever they post a story):
As for the rest of Dave's rant, I fail to see who he's talking about. Most of the open source proponents that rose to fame during the dot-com boom had no problems with working with proprietry companies, and believed that the worlds should co-exist and cooperate. The only person who fits Dave's description is Richard Stallman, who has been around for over twenty years, and isn't going anywhere. I also don't understand the section about how open source excluded many well-intentioned hard-working developers
. Surely, open source is more inclusive than the traditional methods of software development? The only reason I can think of people being excluded is for patent/trademark issues, like with the Mono Project. This has less to do with Open Source, and more a damning indictment on how the software industry abuses patent/trademark law to prevent competition.
The MPAA is currently spreading word about how ‘thieves’ on the Internet are stealing the livelihoods by sharing movies, and how copyright laws need to be strengthened and extended, to last for "forever minus one day" (The US Constitution demands that limits must be set on copyright terms). Meanwhile, the film companies seem to be sitting idly whilst some of the great works of the 20th century are rotting away in their vaults.
The master camera negative of My Fair Lady was found in a quake-riddled vault in California eight years ago, forgotten, slowly decomposing. This wasn't an obscure film that had been langushing out of the public consciousness. This was a huge, $20 million dollar film, one of the last productions that Jack L. Warner ever undertook, and garnered eight Oscars at the 1965 Ceremony. And yet here it was, disintegrating. In this case, a happy ending was found; a restartion team was formed, and they managed to produce a new, digitally-enhanced print which is almost the equal of the original 1964 print.
However, other famous films have not been so lucky. At the moment, the prints for The Alamo, and It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World will be completely lost by next year. The Nun's Story is apparently in a bad way. And yet, very few people seem to care.
It's galling to see the movie companies clamouring for infinite copyright terms when they're prepared to let some of the greatest works of Western art in the 20th Century rot behind closed doors.
There was an interesting report on Newsnight last night which got me thinking about the differences between the Internet and ‘real life’. The current director of the British Museum, Robert Anderson, is standing down, and the report by Julian Spalding labasted the Museum for not organising the Museum in a more interesting (to him, anyway) fashion. One of his examples was that the Tribute Penny, was buried in a glass case with many other coins, and should be given a section all to itself. Anderson pointed out that the Penny was part of a much larger display explaing howthe idea of money, and how it has developed through the ages.
Who's right? They both are.
How do you group things like the Penny, Vietnamese art, ancient writings, and all the myraid of items at the Museum? There's just so many ways of doing it, all providing perfectly fine classifications, but which may appeal to some people more than others. For a more mundane example, think of all the different ways you can organise your music collection (I have the honour of being called a freak by Jo Whiley about the order of my CDs, so I speak with some authority). You could do it alphabetically, by title or by artist. There's a chronological option, either by release date or purchase date, thus providing snapshots of music of the time or the music you were listening to respectively. You could group by the movement that a band belongs to (Britpop, post-rock, pop, and so on), or simply by the colour of the album. Each classification provides a slightly different view of your music collection, which also seems to alter your reaction to your collection (an album that may have been swamped in the alphabet classification may stand out when albums are organised by year, for example).
The problem is that changing these classifications is normally a tough job. Computers, however, allow us to change our view of things on a whim. The Internet Movie Database is a great example of this. Looking at the entry at My Fair Lady, we get reams of information about the film, but it has links which make us look at the film differently. With one click, we can see how it releates to Audrey Hepburns's career. Another click shows us that is part of the latter part of George Cukor's directorial life, whilst yet another click takes us to a list of films released in 1964. Completely different ways of looking at the film, which would require major physical upheavals in the real world, but extremely simple given a computer and a hypertext system.
Erm, yes. No, I don't get out much. Why do you ask?
When was the last time that the publication of a single comic changed evrything? Was it ten years ago, when Youngblood #1 signalled the speculator boom? Fifteen years ago, when Watchmen #1 cast a mature and accomplished look at superheroes? Forty years since Stan Lee's Fantastic Four announced the Marvel Age? Showcase #4? Detective Comics #27? Action Comics #1?
Shonen Jump #1 is being published in November. In Japan, it has a readership of 3.4 million every week. It will be in every Suncoast store in the USA. It is being published on a returnable basis. It's cheap, crammed full of exciting, energetic manga, and it has the possibility to change everything.
With a price tag of $4.95 for 240 pages, the Marvel/DC newsstand selection will be slaughtered. Children will go for the value, rather than spending $2.25 on a (admittedly very lovely) 22-page New X-Men. pamphlet. Retailers, especially in the more traditional outlets (bookstores, newsagents) will prefer the higher profit margin that Jump will provide, and the fact that Viz will be making the comic returnable just adds to the appeal.
Shonen Jump will feature series such as Cartoon Network's popular Dragonball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh, meaning that advertisers will be more plentiful than other publishers whose audience often skews the wrong side of thirty.
Viz Communications could own the US comic industry within two years.
Fasten your seatbelts. The Japanese are coming.
I really do wish I didn’t turn bright red every time I talked to someone. It’s rather annoying.
Audrey Hepburn's accent in The Unforgiven is a work of Dick Van Dyke proportions.
The movie marathon continues apace. Latest update:
They may look flimsy, but after having one bounce on my foot, I can assure you that Visors are quite solid.
Does anybody else sometimes have difficulty reading certain Region 2 DVDs in a Panasonic SR-8585 DVD-ROM drive? My copies of My Fair Lady, Butch Cassidy, and certain West Wing discs don't like playing, and cause the drive to make weird clicking noises.
Floss talks about the gradual decline of Lauren Laverne. I have to agree with everything he's saying - I made a concerted effort to listen to her Saturday show on Xfm, but it's horrible. Nothing like her stand-in performances on the Evening Session a few years back. It's going to get worse before it gets better as well, seeing as she starts the new Channel 5 Pop! programme this week. Someone needs to lock her in a recording studio...
Not that anybody cares about my opinion, but I'd like to join in the growing chorus of approval on Mozilla's tabbed browsing features. Contary to mpt's complaining, I find them intuitive and extremely helpful in organising my browsing sessions. Last night, for example, I had two Mozilla windows, one reading a Slashdot discussion about good books for Computer Scientists and the links I followed from that article, and the other viewing some updated weblogs. If I was letting the window manager handle things, I would have had over twenty windows on-screen. This would create a hideous and hard-to-navigate clutter on my desktop - the tabs make it a breeze.
Except, of course, that my Visor doesn’t have any wireless capabilities, so I’ll be back home when it comes to uploading this entry. It’s the thought that counts.
Bruce Perens isn’t going through with his planned breaking of the DMCA today. I understand why HP don’t want him to do it, but the words of Lessig keep coming back. Most of us are quite content to sit and whine about the latest RIAA/MPAA controversy on Slashdot, but we don’t do anything about it. If we don’t do something soon, we’ll wake to find that they’ve won without us putting up any sort of fight.
Two weeks left until the Great America Experiment begins. The Computer Science Department has sent their itinerary for the first week including a mammoth Thursday session lasting from 1:30pm to 9pm. Ouch.
Reasons to love technology: being able to read Robert Moses’s writings in The Atlantic on urban sprawl, writing this blog entry, and playing Tetris, all whilst being stuck in traffic on a bus.
My friend Garry is going to the World Frisbee Championships in Hawaii next week. Until today, I didn’t even know such a thing even existed…
