Some more open-source CMS sites (I’ve blogged some before, but here’s a better list).
And here are some reasons not to use them!
Archive for April, 2003
You’re In Control (Urine Control) is the latest in the list of “how on earth did they get that funded” projects.
The You’re In Control system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of a stream of urine, enabling people to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal.
I wonder if this will sort out or worsen the splashback problems with urinals.
Creative Commons Licenses have some issues, the most serious one of which is that by using one, you warrant that fact-checking and copyright are OK. That means you should check that your quoting of someone else’s content is OK with them and that you’re not infringing trademarks. The warrant piece means that someone can sue you if you haven’t. At least in the US. So be careful out there.
A nice article for geeks (and maybe some non-geeks) that shows quite how many layers upon layers upon layers there are in a typical modern program. No wonder we have bugs…
Phil Greenspun nails it again. The fine in the Wall Street stock boosting settlement is around 0.25% of the organisations total value. Compared to a median wealth of $63k for US families, this equates to a fine of $126, less than a speeding ticket. Just sickening that these people can all get away with the loot.
Jakob asks whether plain-text ads continue to rule? His answer: not really outside search engines and classifieds. Why? Because we’re going to look for something when visiting those sites, and the text ads just make sense. When we visit a newspaper page, we may just ignore text ads if they are not directly relevant.
There’s a gargoyle (or grotesque) of Darth Vader on Washington National Cathedral. I love this! More churches should update themselves in this manner, not hark back to some non-existent gothic vision. It’s just like Roman statues - they should be exhibited in the colours that they would have been painted in, as well as in the pristine white marble form we know them in now.
Ben runs a story that Denise Lewis has hired one of the creators of a massive athletic doping programme as her coach. This is a little bit worrying: a) it doesn’t sound like sensible risk management (what if DL part fails a drugs test?) and b) surely the guy shouldn’t be able to practise any more? In some ways it makes sense: the guy is obviously pushing limits the whole time. That’s the way sport is: you have to be continually striving to be better than anyone else has ever been in order to win.
Firstgov.gov, the rather unattractively named US government gateway is finally to get a CMS. I hate to think how many people they needed to update it without a CMS. That said, it is a pure portal with very little internal content. That’s not so hard to update.
The global patent system is bust. It will cost anyone around $250k to register a patent across the globe. This means that the system massively discriminates against small inventors who won’t have this kind of financial muscle. Let’s go for harmonisation ASAP.
Some more useful BitTorrent sites:
I’m glad I’m back at work: I could get obsessive about finding the one missing episode of a particular show!
Jared Diamond asks the question Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? (Scroll down for the talk).
What I’m going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group
decision making. I’ll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat
fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to
anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when
the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then,
after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the
problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts
to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses
of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely,
successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why
groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to
help groups make good
decisions.
Dan Bricklin writes a game-changing note discussing why online piracy isn’t shoplifting. Summary: online piracy is like watching and listening to the open air concerts at Kenwood from outside the enclosure. There’s a potential loss of income (in that you might have bought a ticket or might have paid Sky for the service) but no direct harm to the venue. Shoplifting results in direct financial harm to someone, most likely the store which has already paid for the CD. At the very least, someone has paid for the CD to be produced. So in one case there’s direct harm, in the other there isn’t.
Telemarketer reveals tricks of trade. Nasty.
Surprised consumers often complain when they find an unexplained $30 charge on their bill, the former employee, who requested anonymity, said. Epixtar then produces phone recordings proving that the charges were authorized.
Nasca said those recordings, which are made with consumers’ consent, are routinely kept by the company to verify that charges were authorized.
But the former employee, who was laid off by the company several weeks ago, alleges that Epixtar’s telemarketers use a variety of techniques — including altering taped telephone calls — to prove that customers agreed to charges.
Here’s a strange one - normally, I’d be anti legislation that protects people from themselves, but this kind of cramming should be heavily punished once there’ sufficient evidence. It’s easy to be a sucker in this situation. That said, I don’t think we’ve gone so far down this road in the UK.
Philip Greenspun treats the Harry Potter series as an experiment in CEO pay. The take-out? Don’t pay too much to someone that buying some holiday homes and a jet-share program will distract them from their job.
Random photo of tulips by the Tate Britain from Ben. Luvverly.
Microsoft’s UK Schools Licence has been referred to the OFT. As it should be:
the requirement for schools licensed under the School Agreement to licence Microsoft software for all their eligible computers, regardless of whether schools then choose to install the licensed Microsoft software on all those computers included within the licensing terms.
This is like a barber’s saying that they would only supply you with a haircut if you buy a haircut voucher for everyone else in your family, even if they’re bald!
Entertainment Industry Loses in Web Case because the Judge said that there were substantial non-infringing uses for P2P software.
Judge Stephen Wilson of United States District Court ruled that Grokster and StreamCast Networks, which offers the Morpheus peer-to-peer software, are not guilty of copyright infringement. The judge said those services — unlike Napster, an earlier music-swapping software company — were essentially no different from the companies that created the videocassette recorder, which also allowed consumers to make their own copies.
Interesting thought from the trademark blog: if the Grokster network is legal, then what is the status of the record companies’ attempts to disable the networks by flooding them with rubbish files?
Phil Ringnalda manages to explain TrackBack in a quibble about Userland’s implementation. I’ve been struggling with TB ever since it was implementation.
Ever wondered what a billionnaire dotcommer does when they get bored of IT? The answer: they look to space. In some ways, this could make the dotcom boom worthwhile - a transfer of monies from gullible (or fraudulently mislead) investors to a serious project to expand human operations off the planet.
