Slow news day?

April 24th, 2006

Breaking News

Ignorance

March 21st, 2006

Dilbert
From http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive

Bit of a extra metaphor in the ‘height’ comment there I think. Despite being just over 6ft, that is how I feel at times…..

March 1st, 2006

what matters is people.jpg

From Hugh at GapingVoid, having to actually think about who uses your site is a pain isn’t it?

February 24th, 2006

I think someone has gotten the wrong end of the stick here.

The article is suggesting that a certain Trading Standards Officer has a problem with distributing free software.

The Trading Standards Officer said they had:

encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

This I think is the point that narked them a bit, and I can understand why…

I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us

So someone is selling copies of an otherwise free product.  They are making money from a product they have not made or bought, by selling it to people who don’t realise it is free.  To me that’s fairly fraudulent, they clearly aren’t telling these people it can be downloaded for free, from a web site.

As the Trading Standards Officer says, it must make it difficult to enforce certain antipiracy laws when people are being scammed by a company trying to make them pay for a free product.  If that cannot be clamped down on, because actually Mozilla are happy wiht that, it sets a bit of a precedent for other cases.

Personally I think Mozilla should be against the selling of their otherwise free product.  Someone is making money off the back of work done by other people, under the impression it is being distributed for free.  If I’d contributed to Friefox, I’d want some royalites from these nefarious companies selling my work against my original expectations….

December 20th, 2005

I just installed the Performancing.com Firefox Extension and writing this post to see how it works.

It’s an extension that lets you hook up to various blog platforms (blogger, hosted and custom Wordpress, livejournal, typepad, moveable type) and post to them from Firefox itself, ratehr than actually visitng the site. Handy for those inspirational moments when you don’t want to go to the effort of actually navigating to you’re admin section, heh.

It comes up with a little pencil and notepad icon on the status bar at the bottom of FF 1.5 and once you’ve added your account/s, you jsut click on it and start typing. I guess we’ll see how well it does it’s job when I submit this post :) Looks pretty slick so far though, nice work Nick and Jed!

Disney take one step forward, several steps back

November 3rd, 2005

Ocotber 2004, Andy Clarke announces the redesign of the Disney UK Store and gave some great insight into the process. The design is nice, and lives up to high standards of semantic code and accessibility.

November 2005, Disney UK Store launches a new design full of tables, spacer gifs and JavaScript rollovers :(

R.I.P Common Sense….

Why should Flickr pay you to use their service?

October 27th, 2005

There seem to be a few people suggesting that Flickr (and presumably other sites along the same lines) should pay people who ‘add content’ to their site, which then helps them make money via the ads displayed….

I think that is WHOLLY missguided and forgetting what going on.

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“Web 2.0″, why?

October 18th, 2005

I hope I’m not the only one, but I really don’t get this whole “Web 2.0″ thing and why everyones going crazy over it.

Wow, so someone realised that having tools is one thing, but having tools that work easily, and work well is another thing, and suddenly having a more efficient tool means the web has moved on a version? Um, ok, can anyone say ’stupid buzzword’?

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The nature of blogs

October 18th, 2005

No one seems quite able to closely define what a blog is. They know when they see one, but I’ve not seen a good definition yet.
Some people say blogs have to have comments and RSS for example, but you can have that with normal articles. Several people have moaned about the various ‘top blogger’ lists (which is just a silly pissing contest anyway) including sites that aren’t really blogs.

So what makes up a blog, really?
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God makes society worse?

September 29th, 2005

I generally try not to go on about this kind of thing on my blog, but religion is a particular bugbear of mine and this is a pretty interesting report, though I’m sure there are many holes in the argument.

Via Tom Coates I found an article at Times Online about a report that suggests Societies are worse off ‘when they have God on their side’.

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