brainwagon

Cory Doctorow thinks that the recent move by the NAS and NSTF to ban the use of their copyrighted materials as part of the Kansas standards is ill-conceived and poorly motivated. He says: I don’t think this is a proper use for copyright. Copyright is not about endorsement or agreement, and its not a right […]

Charles Petzold has some interesting thoughts in his essay Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, but for me, it’s really this which illustrates why Microsoft is sapping all the allure out of programming: Today we are ready for the official release of the .NET Framework 2.0. Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with […]

Wow, it’s hard to imagine a more idiotic or wrong-headed school policy than this one. At Pope John XIII Regional High School, principal McHugh decided that students should not have blogs, and have threatened those who oppose the ban with suspension. The primary impetus behind the ban is to protect students, McHugh said. The Web […]

Wow, just when you think it couldn’t get any stranger in the Scobleized universe, we get this posting, quoting: Personal note to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates: can I have some money to get Microsoft a significant entry into the Web 2.0 market? A little more than it cost Yahoo to buy Flickr but far […]

Twice in one day… Scoble responds to lots of criciticism that he’s evangelizing a crappy format, and really misses the forest for the trees. Actually, he misses the trees too. Earlier today I recorded this podcast, which I wasn’t going to post, but if Scoble’s going to go on, I think it actually merits it. […]

James Robertson doesn’t much like OPML or RSS as file formats, and tells us why: Ye gods, it’s time someone came out and said something. OPML is a really, really crappy format. Really crappy. I had massive headaches implementing OPML support for import/export in BottomFeeder. Why? Because there’s no real specification. Like everything Dave Winer […]

I know, bashing Microsoft is becoming a theme with me over the last few weeks, but I keep reading stuff on the news and blogs, and I can’t help but comment. Today’s big news is that Microsoft is reorganizing: here is their press release. There has been criticism of late from both inside and outside […]

Some stories just make you shake your head. “I’m not racist or anything,” he said. “It’s just, some people I hate, some people I don’t get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they’re better than everyone else.” How can you tell if you’re a racist? If you […]

Sigh. I’ve been flaming Microsoft for not listening to its customers, so it is sad to see that TiVo has decided to screw their customers at the request of copyright holders. Previously, you could store whatever programs you recorded for as long as you like. Now, if the copyright holder requests it, TiVo will refuse […]

Robert Scoble thoughtfully provided a list of all the revolutionary stuff he thinks is being introduced at PDC. To his credit, he includes links to at least on detractor as well as a couple of cheerleaders. I said last week that I’d probably not be all that enthused about anything that they were releasing, and […]

I’ve been following the PDC blogging a bit this morning, and I can’t help but think that there is very little meat that is actually being blogged about. Here’s a great for instance: Light up on Windows Vista: The “Top 10” List What are these top 10? Follow the Windows Vista style guidelines Enrich the […]

It’s just not that I bought an original Xbox that died a month out of warranty (so Microsoft decided I needed to send them $129 to fix it), scratched every disk that ever went in it, and generally was a pain in the ass. But Microsoft seems to have not learned something important about Xboxes: […]

I must admit, I find Robert Scoble to be a fascinating blogger. I think it is because I see him just as a person who is in most respects intelligent and thoughtful, but whose thought processes are significantly hindered by a desire to be good at his job, and his job is to promote Microsoft […]

Robert Scobe writes: Of course, I should be thanking Steve Gillmor. He has lowered expectations of Microsoft so low that our customers have even stopped making really creative guesses of what we’re going to show next week at the PDC. Robert, has it ever occurred to you that nobody is making really creative guesses because […]

Apparently some people concerned that recent donations to the Drupal project are being used to buy computers from Dell, an operation which has done relatively little to support open software. One of the Drupal-ers responded with a pretty coherent explanation of why they went with Dell, and the basic reason is simple: Dell makes decent […]