A New .SIG Line for Your Email

Found on a random Slashdot posting but utterly wonderful:

RIAA Headquarters: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

(Apologies to George Lucas)

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Ok.  It's Not Just The US Government that Has Gone Insane -- Greece Too

Quick Summary: Greece has banned all electronic games INCLUDING those on cell phones.

This is insane.  Think about it -- if you have a cell phone, you don't even have a choice whether or not there is a game on it.  I never played games on most of my cell phones -- but I could go to jail for it.  Good lord!

http://theregister.co.uk/content/4/26939.html

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956357.html

From News.com:

September 3, 2002, 11:18 AM PT

In Greece, playing a shoot-'em-up video game could land you in jail.
The Greek government has banned all electronic games across the country, including those that run on home computers, on Game Boy-style portable consoles, and on mobile phones. Thousands of tourists in Greece are unknowingly facing heavy fines or long terms in prison for owning mobile phones or portable video games.

Greek Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with "electronic mechanisms and software" from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of dollars for playing or owning games.

The law applies equally to visitors from abroad: "If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in," said a commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London, who declined to give her name.

Internet cafes will be allowed to continue to operate, providing no games-playing takes place. If a customer is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the cafe owner will be fined and the place closed.

The Greek government introduced the law in an attempt to prevent illegal gambling. According to a report in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, Greek police will be responsible for catching offenders, who will face fines of 5,000 to 75,000 euros (about $4,980 to $74,650) and imprisonment of one to 12 months. "The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines," the report said.

The Greek gaming community has reacted with a mixture of shock, disbelief and anger. One Web site, www.gameland.gr, has started a news service about the ban and opened a petition to protest it. In addition, it is posting English translations of the law and messages of support from around the world.

A test case is to come before the Greek courts next week, and the Greek gaming community is already planning protests in the event that the defendant is convicted.

"We are trying to organize a protest against this law," said Petros Tipis of Thessaloniki-based gaming company Reload Entertainment, which has had to cancel a gaming tournament that was to be held this week.

If the prosecution of the defendant next week is successful, said Tipis, the Greek gaming industry will take the case to the European Court.

In the meantime, Tipis told ZDNet UK, a lot of people in Greece are very worried about the new law. "They are taking it very seriously," he said. "It even affects the games that come with Windows. This law isn't the right one," he added. "It is unfair. It was introduced too quickly."

Reload's tournament, which was to be held Fridah, was a qualifier for the CPL Oslo 2002 gaming tournament. "Now we are trying not to lose the two slots we were given from CPL for the tournament," Tipis said. "This was the first time for a qualifier (for this tournament) in Greece."

8:28:50 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Buffy Season Premiere Date

September 24th.  Just saw the first commercial for it.  A few interesting scenes -- Dawn breathing fire!!! What's up with that?  If you are a Buffy fan then mark your calendar. 

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Thank You Microsoft for Nuking Our Christmas High Tech Buying Season

NOTE: This started out kinda rational and I think became a "rant o rama".  Sorry.  Hope it at least entertains.

This came out today:

From News.com:

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday released additional details about digital entertainment PCs coming for the holidays. But new anti-copying technology could hamper sales, say analysts and potential buyers.

...

Von Ehman, a Windows user and an analyst for West Virginia state government in Charleston, also balked at the copy-protection mechanism.

"If you copy protect in any way, the kids will scream bloody murder," he said. "It's a young person's market, and that would be a suicide" for Microsoft in the marketplace.

...

Go: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956285.html?tag=cd_mh

Slashdot Discussion on It

Between the above as well as Microsoft's very, very silly Mira device, it is really looking to me like the intel compatible marketplace, the bulk of the high tech PC revenue, is going to be a dreary, dreary place this Christmas.  Here's a quick review of what I see as pretty much the facts:

1. The economy will still be bad come Christmas buying season (I see nothing to convince me otherwise; nor does the Wall Street Journal which I read daily).
2. In bad economic times, people don't spend on non-essentials.  Multimedia Entertainment PCs are non-essentials as are Mira flat panel tablets.
3. Whenever there is the slightest bit of uncertainty, people don't buy -- particularly when times are bad.  Whether or not the copy protection issues are as bad as the article makes out remains to be seen.  We honestly won't know until it ships.  Still people will be reading this press release, the Slashdot discussion and more.  And we'll all suspect the worst.  Finally when Mom and Dad ask little Junior if they want this system as a present, they'll say "DOH!  Not on your life.".
4. Mira feels to me like a luxury -- not a requirement.  It's also not a product that you can readily rationalize as a work tax deduction.  I can much more easily see people buying an additional laptop and a WIFI hub than Mira but Mira, being newer and sexier, will cloud the market and confuse people.
5. Bottom line?  Get ready for a bad ass Christmas PC market.  Without this stuff it would have been bad.  But when you add this kind of silliness in, it just gets worse and worse.  A huge problem is Microsoft is trying to sell software to the entertainment industry for DRM while also trying to sell software to end users --- WHEN THEIR INTERESTS ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED!!!  Take a side guys!  Suck it up and get out of the DRM business once and for all.  It's a loser anyway and you are just going to hose yourself in the end.  Your revenues really come from the OEM side on the PC maker, not Hollywood.  If you have to then spin out the damn DRM stuff.  I mean even Sony isn't limiting us this way:

Already Sony ships Vaio PCs with DVRs and most of the other features found on the HP Media Center PC. But Sony does not impose copy protection. So a consumer could use Sony's GigaPocket Personal Video Recorder software to record a TV show, convert the file to MPEG-2 video with another Sony application and burn the program to a DVD.

Same article: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956285.html?tag=cd_mh

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My Hat's Off to Simon: FontBitches Everywhere Remorse!

Over the weekend I got the email below from Simon.  I held off posting it until now because of the U.S. holiday.  What Simon did was create a JavaScript bookmarklet that makes fixed font size web pages resizable!!!  I don't understand how it does it (honestly haven't even looked) but it works fantastically.  It now has a permanent position on my browser links bar and I strongly recommend that you add it to yours as well.  If you don't want to go visit Simon's site to get it then you can drag the "FontFixer!" link from just above the XML button to the right to your links bar and you'll be in AntiFontBitch heaven!

A Note on Usage: Once it's dragged to your browser's links bar, select "Yes" even though it's "unsafe" (it isn't actually unsafe, it is just JavaScript).  After that if you are reading a blog that is too small then just click it one time and the blog will have bigger text.  After that you can use View => Text Size to change the size as needed.

Simon, I honestly can't thank you enough.  You've made my blog reading very, very happy.

Thank you very, very much.

-- Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Willison [mailto:XX@yy.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 01, 2002 7:15 AM
To: scott@fuzzygroup.com
Subject: Bookmarklet to make fixed fonts resizable in IE

Hi Scott,

I've been following your anti-fixed-font-size campaign with interest - this
is a big problem and it's good to see someone taking it on. In an ideal
world everyone would stick to resizable fonts (or use Mozilla ;) ) but
since there's no such thing I've written a bookmarklet that converts fixed
fonts to resizable ones:

Go

Hope you (and others) find it useful,

Simon Willison

--
Web Developer, www.incutio.com
Weblog: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/

 

 

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Picture of the Day

From Moxie (who's an absolute hoot; that's a good thing).

3:11:38 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Open Source, Ego, Leadership and Responsiveness

I'd add as a side note that forks happen due to lack of responsiveness.  Open Source projects are inherently 24 x 7 x 365 -- whether or not the project founders are willing to make that committment.  When the leadership of an Open Source project drops the ball, takes an extended vacation or whatever, they are judged by the delta from their previous responsiveness.  If they were never responsive then it isn't a big deal.  But when a project is very responsive and then a key member or member just disappears or stops being responsive, that dramatically affects people's perceptions of the project and increases the potential for a fork.  Because, from the perspective of the potential forker, given that the ball got dropped once, it could happen again.  I honestly don't know what the solution is here since we all have lives and for a lot of us, Open Source is a labor of love.  Stuff happens.  But I understand the perspective of the forker.  I'm also a pretty strong darwinist and I think that while the redundancy this causes is bad, it's not all bad.  Good stuff often comes of forks.  Look at how much more secure NetBSD is since it split from FreeBSD (I got those right, correct?  All too easy to confuse them).

PHP Everywhere: Home. News and feature articles on PHP and ADOdb database library. - Open Source is all about sharing good software. But a lot of Open Source software is developed by journeyman programmers, so the quality is uneven, and sometimes plain bad. And even if it's possible to write good software, things can still get ugly. I'm sad to say that PostNuke, that forked from PHPNuke, that was begotten from ThatWare, is going to fork again.

When things turn sour, Open Source is not about open minds, but naked egos and pride. That's why the key to really successful Open Source projects is leadership, not merely technical skills. And this holds true in life too.

From http://php.weblogs.com/ to http://www.natrak.net/ to moi.

3:07:52 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Can You Listen?

From my favorite sociologist:

My car broke down this weekend. This was the first time I got to experience car malfunction with any inconvenience. (I did have a flat tire a few months ago but that went relatively smoothly with the help of a friend.) This weekend's situation was certainly not helped by the fact that it was a national holiday in the U.S. and most shops were closed.

http://campuscgi.princeton.edu/~eszter/weblog/archives/00000081.html

11:58:23 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This