Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
[Original Link] Lawrence Lessig is pretty good now at coming up with sound-bites himself, but Steve Mallet is running a fun competition: "Can you summarise his main message in three seconds or less?"
Some of the responses:
"Freedom is more valuable than the right to profit"
"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it"
"IP. To boldly restrict where no man has gone before."
More info on the authors of these, and other examples, can be found here.
[Original Link] I have a nice row of almost unused function keys on my Apple keyboard. I wanted to map them to do some of my regular tasks, so that F1, for example, would open Palm Desktop and prompt me to search for an address.
Keyboard Maestro allowed me to do this easily and has lots of other cute features which you can use if wanted and disable if not.
This is also a very nicely tailored use of shareware. The free version does enough for many people without nagging, but you can pay $20 if you want that little bit more. Recommended.
Here's a picture I took today in Windermere in the English Lake District:
Note the implication of the logo. The internet, in all its glory, is represented by a letter 'e'...
Since upgrading my elderly Powerbook to 'Jaguar', the latest version of Apple's operating system, I'm struck once again by an important contrast with Windows. As far as I can remember, every upgrade of Windows I ever did gave you extra features, sometimes even features you wanted, but at the cost of speed.
Mac OS X, perhaps because of its youth, has the wonderful characteristic that every version has been faster than its predecessor, which is especially good if your hardware isn't the latest. This is particularly wholesome because Apple, unlike Microsoft, does make a lot of its money from hardware and so has a vested interest in encouraging you to upgrade.
Rose & I agreed there could be few things we would like to watch less than hours of analysis and dredging up of old emotions one year on from 9/11.
But almost at the same time we're going to have the only thing that could come close for awfulness: it's 5 years on from the death of Princess Diana. I think the TV can stay firmly switched off for a couple of weeks...
[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?