The Desktop Fishbowl
Charles blogs all the random nerd stuff he can find.

Sunday, 3 March 2002

MusicCity's Morpheus violating GPL [Slashdot] This knee-jerk is a perfect example of why Slashdot may, in fact, deserve to die. 6:38:25 PM

Jakob Nielsen: if you discourage deep linking, you'll lose 27% of your most promising customers. 6:27:24 PM

Mystery man. A new documentary revives an old controversy: Was actor and landowner William Shakespeare merely a front man for Christopher Marlowe, the flamboyant gay genius and shadowy Elizabethan spy? [Salon.com] Interesting. I never knew there were quite so many reasons to doubt Shakespeare wrote his own stuff. The "Marlowe was a spy and faked his own death" stuff seems a little in the same vein as "Elvis is alive and working in a burger bar", but it's still food for thought. 10:58:34 AM

XP update to go beyond mere fixes. Along with squashing bugs, as service packs normally do, Microsoft's first major update to Windows XP will add support for Tablet PCs and a fancier graphical interface. [CNET News.com] This is just plain wrong. You either fix bugs, or you add new features. Adding new features means adding new bugs. Providing someone no option but to get the features (and new bugs) with the bugfixes is wrong. 9:24:39 AM

I have a confession to make. Radio is also an outliner. I'm thinking more about that these days. [Scripting News] It's not necessarily a very good outliner, though. I'm about to buy OmniOutliner as a replacement - Radio got me on the outlining buzz, but (at least on Mac OS X), the outliner is clunky - it freezes every couple of seconds while Radio does something else - and single-level undo is so intensely annoying that you have to remember to save every five minutes in case you delete half the outline with a careless click and can't get it back. (And I've already ranted about OPML) 8:59:01 AM

Bruce Sterling, Information Wants to be Worthless. Manages to be highly entertaining, without imparting any information, or making any real points. [link from RageBoy] 8:48:39 AM

FHM Magazine is running a poll for the Sexiest 100 Woman of 2002. A link was posted on Fark, and of course, everyone there started voting for Wil Wheaton (who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek TNG, and also won "Blogger of the Year" in the 2002 Bloggies, mostly because he's the closest thing blogging has to a celebrity (which says a lot about blogging, and awards)). This is, of course, nothing new. I remember (I think it was 1995) the first time Time Magazine opened up a "Man of the Year" poll on the net, and it was hijacked by the kibologists. And then, of course, there was the Java vs .NET poll that suddenly reversed direction one day after a lot of hits from Microsoft's domain. Most sites generally pretend this sort of thing doesn't happen, and quietly deletes the votes. But kudos to whoever's running the FHM site for acknowledging the joke. 8:17:19 AM

I will not be paying for a Slashdot subscription. My reason for this is that if Slashdot were to cease to exist, I'd not miss it. There are heaps of other (usually more accurate) places on the net that you can get tech news, and the discussions on the site were never particularly noteworthy. I pay for Salon. I bought Radio. I bought Sluggy Freelance books. If a service on the net provides me with something I think I might miss if it's gone, I'll pay for it. Slashdot has no such place. And don't get me started on Kuro5hin. What a bunch of pretentious, self-important navel-gazers. 8:13:57 AM