The Register: WinXP Piracy Report. Windows XP is already on sale all over Thailand for $2.
Every MS product ever made is also available at 80B [about $2] per CD, including some bonus CDs containing Dos 6.22, Win3.11/95/98SE2 and ME (English and Thai version available). Training materials, development tools, service packs, AutoCAD/Lightwave - you name it, its there,” says Jon. “As far as I can see, anti-piracy measures are enacted only when the US makes a big noise. We then see a few TV items of police destroying pirate copies (last time by speeding thousands of pirate CDs in a parking lot and walking over them with elephants - you couldn’t make this stuff up!). Meanwhile the shops continue to operate with impunity.
NTK.net: Natalie Imbruglia’s new album features dumbass copy protection [via The Register] In a
bizarre bid to pacify PC users, the disc also contains a
Windows app which will play the entire album from a chunked
42meg MP3 file. … [a reader] has already
successfully burned the files and the player onto a CDR, where
they sound as “bloody awful” as they did on the original.
The Register: Personal firewalls are ‘futile’. As usual, The Reg overstates the case, but this may be the kind of thing we see in the next generation of nasty trojans and/or spyware. Bleah.
DayPop’s Top 40 is beginning to resemble a supermarket tabloid. Partly, this is because life imitates art, etc., but it’s still disturbing to realize that these are today’s most-linked stories:
- Bin Laden:
Yes, I did it
- Jet crashes in New York
- “I’ve got the world’s longest tongue”
- CIA recruits psychics to predict future terrorist attacks
Since DayPop determines these rankings solely and automatically from weblog links, I am now officially part of the problem. *sigh*
Jay Allen says we should all put RSSBoxes of DayPop’s Top 40 on our sites. (On a Manila server, this involves inserting a single built-in macro in your site template.) This is the general case of what I just did manually.
Self-Referential Aptitude Test. Now you know how DayPop would feel. Serves you right.
MSN.com, November 12, 2001, noon. This is why portals are dumb.
Pictures. Picture gallery at CNN. (opens new window)
Yahoo most-viewed pictures has a few more pictures. Watch Britney plummet off the list.
The Onion: A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again. Not today.
Terrorism ruled out as cause of Queens crash.
Up to 246 passengers are thought to have been aboard the American Airlines Airbus A300.
All New York area airports have been closed following the crash, in the Rockaways area of Queens, a residential neighbourhood under the JFK airport flight path.
Bridges and tunnels into New York have also been closed but the Federal Aviation Authority has ruled out terrorism as a cause. The organisation earlier stated that the cause of the crash is not known, although there are reports the jet suffered engine failure. Washington says US Air Force patrols over New York received no calls before the crash.
Fighters have been flying over the city’s skies 24 hours a day since September 11. Crews have been told they must be prepared to shoot down any hijacked civilian aircraft if ordered to do so.
The passenger jet had taken off from John F Kennedy Airport - five to 10 miles away, when it crashed into buildings and burst into flames. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has joined rescue services at the scene. At least four buildings are said to be on a fire. One witness reported debris falling from sky and told the Fox News Channel that four homes were on fire.
Another told CNN he was 40 blocks away and saw: “Just a lot of smoke. Tons and tons of smoke. You can see emergency vehicles heading to area. Lots of people are standing in the streets. It’s very tense.”
Jakob Nielsen: Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People. Jakob is off his mobile-phones-are-gonna-be-the-wave-of-the-future-any-day-now kick, as well as his micropayments-are-gonna-be-the-wave-of-the-future-any-day-now kick, and back to his bread and butter: kicking websites when they’re down. *sigh* Yes, we should all strive to make web sites (and everything else in the world) accessible to everyone. Yes, my book looks great in Lynx; it even uses the obscure-but-useful-to-blind-people <link rel=”home”/”up”/”previous”/”next”> tags, which text-only browsers like Lynx use to construct navigation links based on the book’s structure (although my pages’ visual navigation links also translate well into Lynx). But the more professional web sites I work on, the more I understand the pressures of real software development, and the more sympathetic I am towards developers who would love to Do The Right Thing(tm) all the time, but can’t for a variety of reasons beyond their control. Because they’re spending all their time working around client-side browser bugs. Because they’re utterly flummoxed by the latest round of server-side web server bugs from the recent service pack that was only supposed to fix gaping security holes. Because they’re navigating internal politics. Because they’re scrambling to keep up with the client’s changing requirements. Because they’re patiently explaining to the latest bungee boss why we should not, really, truly, under any circumstances — including but not limited to being called a dork by the other managers and having sand kicked in our faces and being banished from the executive sandbox and having to spend recess sitting alone on the executive jungle gym and looking out across the lawn at the clique of cool managers who have cool web sites with splash screens and soundtracks and dancing hampsters — do the entire web site in Flash.
Dean Allen Pyrrhicly victorious against ferocious housecat. I feel like utter shit, my hair matted by blood and antiseptic around the stitches. Outside, the cat’s grave, for now, an inescapable beacon.
My condolences to the cat.
“Give him head?” “Be a beacon?”
Look up “Pyrrhic victory” for yourself.
Just kidding, Dean. You know we all love you. Hell, I named my new computer after your dog. Get well soon. And stay away from my cat.
