Friday 22 March 2002

Mideast Cease-Fire Talks to Resume. Security meetings aimed at a cease-fire to end 18 months of Palestinian-Israeli violence were set to resume Friday despite suicide bombings that threatened to scuttle the talks, Israeli and Palestinian officials said. [AP World News] It's good news to learn that talks are to resume, but still there's something repulsive about all these talks about talks about ceasefires while all the time the killing goes on, just as when the formal moment for the end of World War I was set for 11 minutes past eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 but it was perfectly all right for soldiers to kill one another right up to that time. 12:14:45 PM  Your view

CNET NEWS.COM - Anti-piracy bill finally sees Senate. A controversial bill that would ultimately require computer and consumer-electronics companies to build copyright-protection technology into their products was finally introduced in the U.S. Senate on Thursday. [Privacy Digest] Not being familiar with the US legislative process I am not sure of the significance of this announcement, but it sounds very much as if this is the next step along the road to bringing these appalling provisions into law. Does anyone know what the chances are of this Bill succeeding? I recall from part of what I've read on the subject that the proposal includes a provision to include importation of non-complying equipment within its terms, which therefore means that non-US manufacturers would be forced to comply in order to maintain access to the US market -- which is really bad news from an international standpoint. 8:41:32 AM  Your view

PlayStation 3: The next generation. Sony moves ahead with development of the next version of its video game console. Right now, distributed computing is the name of the game. [CNET News.com] What interests me about this article isn't anything to do with PlayStation, but rather the comments about MS's X-Box and its failure to take into account the needs of users outside the US. For instance: "There is a perception we didn't know what we were doing when it came to the controller," [MS spokesman] Isensee said. "What we failed to do is a usability test for a global market. You need to do that, because things that work in the U.S. don't always work in Japan or Europe." That includes the Xbox start-up screen, which had to be redesigned for the Xbox's European launch because nobody realized that the German "einstellungen" wouldn't fit in the same text space as "settings." 4:43:42 AM  Your view

		© Copyright 2002 Jim MacCormaic . Last update: 29/09/2002; 06:02:37 am .