Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
[Original Link] A slightly bizarre article about the aftermath of the Cambridge Lab closure, by Ben Fountain. But it's VNC, Ben, not VCN! It's amazing how many variations there have been on this theme...
[Original Link] A very interesting and important interview cited recently on Slashdot. Nominally about KDE, it covers much larger issues in a compelling and powerful way:.
"...We are steadily heading to a future in which the control of humanity's intellectual property - works of art, multimedia, ideas, writings, etc. - is so vested in software vendor(s) that it is fair to say that the average user of a proprietary desktop will eventually no longer "own", in the traditional sense of the word, his or her own electronic creations. In other words, the products of our creative minds, the very essence of our humanity, are being relentlessly stripped from us.
If you use a proprietary OS to make a video or audio track, or to write a research paper, and save it in one of the default proprietary electronic data formats, you might soon find yourself actually paying someone else run-time and/or license renewal fees just to access your own creations. Not to mention any charges that may apply to distributing copies to others (whether directly or because the recipient must also pay similar runtime or recurring fees to access the data). You tell me, when you have to pay one particular vendor money every time you or someone else views a movie you created, who owns the movie? ..."
[Original Link] Steve Jobs thinks so. But is he building an Apple replacement?
I went back to look at it today, and it's not there. The link doesn't work any more and there's no helpful message to tell me where I might find it. It may be in the archives and available for a fee, but when I found the archives I still couldn't find the article. This makes me much less likely to link to the LA Times in future. Is it really worth it for them?
Here's a post from the exhibition floor at LinuxWorld. I ran MacStumbler here and picked up something like 40 wireless access points. This comes to you through one of them. I've no idea whose it is, but I'm grateful...
[Original Link] A splendid geeky story about car-to-car communication.
I'm a bit too busy to have many inspiring thoughts of my own at present, so here's another from Quotes of the Day. Laurence J. Peter:
"Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor."
"There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience."
[Original Link] This is another of those good ideas that I also thought of but never got around to implementing. There are lots of these. I'm better at the inspiration than the perspiration, which means, in Edison's terms, that I'm 1% of a genius where Russell is 100%. :-(
Anyway, the reason I wanted to do this was because it would have been another excuse to buy an iPod. Imagine an audio news aggregator, which would dump the audioblogs you'd subscribed to onto your iPod whenever you synched it. You could then peruse them using the nice iPod interface. A build-your-own radio station. And yes, it would be even better if real radio stations incorporated RSS-type subscription mechanisms. They should be less concerned about syndication than other online publications, because they would still be able to embed advertisments and jingles in the audio.
I'll get around to it one day. The same goes for that wheel thing I invented a while back...
[thanks to John for the link]