This lucky chap scored an unopened Apple IIc from eBay and, rather than sitting on it to accrue more collector value, decided to “unbox” it, 20 years after it left the factory.
I find it fascinating how there has been so little change to their approach to the first user experience, right from the “Open This First” envelope through to the minimalist, product-centric design of the packaging. And… he does look soooo pleased with himself!
Frustrated by the ugliness of plugging a USB bluetooth adaptor into my Eee PC, I decided that the best thing I could do was gut a bluetooth adapter and install it internally.
Here are my accounts of the process.
This has been the top-ranked download site for the FairUse4WM utility for some time now. It’s served up over 45,000 copies of the utility since I put the page up and there’s no sign of demand slowing down. Now, some months have passed, and it was widely reported in the media that Microsoft was sending takedown (although curiously not DMCA takedown) notices to sites hosting copies of the utility, and many sites did indeed disappear, but so far I’ve not heard anything from anybody regarding the hosting of the file.
Macworld is reporting that MySpace will use ‘audio fingerprinting’ technology to automatically identify copyright infringing material at the point at which it is uploaded.
The system is provided by Gracenote, and appears to be a mixture of ID3 tag recognition and audio waveform matching.
Of course, there are many valid reasons to upload material that the system may tag as infringing, such as parody or critical review. It’ll be impossible for any blogger to add clips of songs to a music review now.
Nokia’s E-Series phones have a few codes you can key in to access various hidden features:
Also, if the phone won’t boot and hangs on the startup screen (white background, blue Nokia logo), you can initiate a factory reset by holding *, 3 and the green button.
Some or all of these seem to work for other S60 devices too, eg: N80.
Ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ was released today. It’s available for Intel x86, AMD64, UltraSPARC T1 and PowerPC architectures.
You can get a copy from the download pages, or via their Shipit service.
The great open source browser, Firefox, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 2.0.
I’ve been using it for the last day or so and I’m impressed. There’s a spell checker for forms, which makes writing blog posts like this much nicer, there are also new tools for reporting phishing sites and sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox, so that the Firefox team can check them out.
Also, tab handling has been improved. There’s now a menu entry that shows recently closed tabs, which is very useful. I’m always closing tabs I didn’t mean to.
It’s not a ground-breaking release, but a nice incremental update that keeps Firefox comfortable ahead of the competition.
The British government is being encouraged to help the BSA (the Business Software Alliance), who are the proprietary software industry’s kneecap gang, enforce the purchasing of software licenses by fining those who are found to be lacking the required licences.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m actually in favour of this.
For starters, the general procedure for companies who fail to purchase licenses is a knock at the door, followed by the rapid purchase of said missing licenses. Once the company is in compliance, then the BSA have nothing else left that they can do. The BSA would like to punish companies who fail to buy licenses as well as just having the licenses bought, so given that 80% of infringements are down to oversight and not malice, it might give companies another reason to avoid the proprietary licensing in the first place and move to free software where you don’t need to keep a careful count of what you’re using. Believe me, I’ve managed licensing before and it’s a complete pain.
Also, if the government is going to enforce Microsofts, Adobes and the rest of the software industrys licensing requirements, by rights it should also enforce Free software licenses such as the GPL. It’s always sad to see the companies wilfully breaking the GPL by incorporating GPL licensed software into their products, and by and large they do this because they know that the guy who wrote it doesn’t have the legal means or the cash to bring a civil case.
If the government will enforce this type of license violation, then it can only be a good thing.
Tomorrow, the patent infringement lawsuit brought against eBay will be heard by a U.S. supreme court judge. The case has been brought by a small company, MercExchange, and covers eBay’s ‘Buy-It-Now’ function.
The case is being closely watched, not only by the software industry, but by the pharmaceutical industries, who see it as an important reinforcement of patent rights. This is more than a little flawed though. I can see how patents may be beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry due to the massive investment required to develop a new drug, but the concept of patenting software inventions is rather different. There is simply no way that a ‘Buy’ button on a website comes anywhere near the complexity and development effort of a new vaccine or treatment.
With a little luck, the outcome of this case will be favourable and strike a blow against the system of software patentability in the U.S., and consequently the its introduction into Europe.
I replace my flakey old D-Link wireless access point with a nice new Belkin 54g one this week. Now, I’ve noticed before that these ones are pretty popular. There’s certainly quite a few belkin54g APs in the general vicinity of my house (which makes me wonder who’s using who’s broadband, and if they even know!). Every single one is unencrypted, and having seen the setup guide I can see why. The instructions in both the quickstart guide and the proper manual both just say:
Enabling the encryption isn’t mentioned, neither is changing the default admin password. You have to dig around deep in the back of the manual to find any mention of these, which is pretty poor considing the default Belkin admin username is admin with no password!
It’s been shown that having an open access point isn’t going to exonerate you if illegal activity is traced back to you, so why are some manufacturers shipping devices with no encouragement to use the encryption? Not all maufacturers seem to follow this trend though; 3Com enable encryption by default, and have a random admin password that’s provided via a sticker on each individual device.
