Skip to content

Month: December 2004

Opera Sings…Well, Talks

Mark Evans: “Internet users must either be lazy, ignorant or strangely satisfied with IE. If more people explored the alternatives out there -which would likely encourage developers to come up with new browsers – I believe surfing the Web will become a better experience. With IE dominating – and some would say controlling – the market, we are only scratching the surface of what the Web can offer.”

More on the (non)demise of BT

Mark Pesce:

“Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation – a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat.”

and:

“It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger

and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.”

Adam Fields: P2P is the Content industry’s worst nightmare…to date. But it just keeps getting worse from there.

BitTorrent non-crisis

So the MPAA has succeeded in having popular torrent tracker site SuprNova shut down. So? As Douglas Rushkoff noted recently, this latest turn will simply be the impetus the hackers need to find a way of tracking torrents in a more distributed fashion. The harder the studios push, the faster the technology evolves. And once all the centralized servers are gone, the studios will have lost their only opportunity to harness the power of P2P networking.

Lumpy Thai

My good friend Noel (Lumpy) is over in Thailand for a cycling holiday and he’s been posting some great pics to his blog.

I know this isn’t exactly news, but I love the power of blogs (and photoblogs and moblogs and uh… vacatio-blogs?) for stuff like this – being able to keep in touch with friends and family from a world away in such a simple, flexible, personal manner. The immediacy of the postings along with the personality in the photos and commentary really make it a much more personal experience than a postcard. I suppose this is what’s replaced the family vacation slideshow?

Oh yeah, and I can’t believe how much Noel looks like his father!!!

More SPAM Poetry

This appeared in my inbox along with an add for cheap viagra:

The course was taken towards the north-west, and the next day the screw of the frigate was at last beating the waters of the Pacific: The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them: He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions of the North. of the monster: and, to say truth, we no longer lived on board?