Archives quotidiennes :

A Discreet Bullhorn

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Reprinted from an article by Matt Fleisher-Black in The American Lawyer. Issues and facts about some blogging lawyers. Here’s a snippet:

Functional though the format can be, attorneys may have difficulty satisfying its inherent bias: punchy, attitudinal expression. Demonstrating expertise in public can make one cautious. « I’ve been careful not to do anything very far out, » concedes Fox. It shows. Only one visitor to Fox’s site has posted a comment. Fox says he is « still trying it out, » and hasn’t formally alerted anyone to the site.

[Article at Law.com]

W3C bows to royalty-free pressure

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Those who know me might understand why this CNET article makes me smile. Hint: I am quite familiar with the struggles another standardization organization has about the same issues.

It is a very tough and interesting issue, mostly from a policy point of view, as the legal issues are fairly simple (as long as everyone accepts the existence of software patents).

Now, arguably patents and royalties on telecom equipment are not quite in the same league as IPR encumbered software elements intended for mass distribution and adoption. Interestingly, the ITU could do both, therefore the consequences of a uniform IPR policy for recommendations will be significant.

[Update: when one of your pages is the first result on Google for a typo it’s time a) to learn to spell and b) to correct it]

So if I don’t copy it, I loose it?

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Great news for CD manufacturers and collectors of AOL promo CDs! The perishable DVD media is born. This had been vaporware for a while. Beyond the environmental issues, I wonder if this won’t do wonders for spread of DVD copying know-how.

Basically the DVD will most likely contain a short extract, not the whooping 4.7 GB from a full DVD and there wil be every incentive to rip the content to your hard drive asap since the disc will become opaque and unreadable in a few hours after being taken out of it’s airtight packaging.

Now, DVD with audio tracks can be interesting even if it is almost absent from the market place (I won’t even get into the DVD-Audio mess). So the media itself is promising and can be made into valuable products, as Fleecy showed me. So maybe this will be a good thing in the end. But can CD and DVDs be recycled?

[via /.]

Googlism

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I assume most people have heard of Googlism by now. It’s a site that uses Google to get a list of things said about a given topic. It works fairly well for the easily amused although a meaningful use was not immediately obvious to me.

Then Fizzz suggested using « Slashdot » as a search term. Here are a few gems:

slashdot is a plot by microsoft to destroy the productivity of linux users
slashdot is filled with repitition that is very compressible
slashdot is to linux what osama bin laden is to islam
slashdot is to net culture what 125th street in harlem is to clothing companies that want to latch onto hip
slashdot is a website where open discussions thrive about things that are really important to the inner nerd in you
slashdot is made up of programmers who suffer from the delusion they are computer scientists