I’m in the middle of reading Lessig‘s Free Culture, which poses some really great ideas, when I see this. That is worse than anything Amazon.com has, since Amazon was probably the first doing it, but even if they weren’t it was not this obvious. Wasn’t the mouse (and thus clicking) invented by Xerox in the PARC? Didn’t Steve Jobs “borrow” (great thing about free culture) this idea and bring it to the Mac? Didn’t Bill Gates borrow this from Jobs?
I swear to god this is the slowest 2-day air shipment ever (and yea I know I got screwed with the holdiday). Since when does DHL do the dirty work for USPS?
I just bought a bunch of books, so far all great. Here’s the list:
The only one I have read all the way through so far is Defensive Design and it’s amazing. It hasn’t left my desk. I just got the others in the last day.
How do you know a government is out of touch with the plebes, er, citizens? When they move to curb a free email service that people are clamoring for. This is where the libertarian in me wants to scream.
I was at the local Apple Store today and they let me know that iPod Mini’s were in stock, both Blue and Silver. Since I have been wanting one myself, and I know they are sold out most everywhere, I bought both. If you know anyone that wants one (Update: the Blue one, I took the Silver) , let me know.
This is how days get made. I’m not sure how our use of categories is smart, but I’ll take the compliment. Maybe it’s the category link format?
In related news, we’re closing in on 200 entries on CarbWire (194 as of now)… That’s a lot of work and hopefully a good resource.
Why is RAM for the new[er] PowerBooks (Aluminum) so expensive? A gig module runs North of $400. I spent $125 the other day for a 512MB chip, but since I have both slots filled with lousy 256MBs I will only get a net gain of 256MB. I have waited a long time for the prices to come down but they haven’t.
It would cost $850 in aftermarket RAM to get 2GB, or a massive $1,200 if you get it from Apple. That adds 33-60% onto the price of the computer depending on the RAM and on the model. Ouch!
Starting about a week ago, MobileTracker’s SiteMeter went down. There was a server problem… A hard disk failure as it later came out. Today they posted a note:
SM5 Server Status Update
Saturday May 15th
This is an update to the problem with the SM5 server. Unfortunately, the drive recovery sevice was not able to recover any files from the damaged hard drive. That means all the previously collected statistics
are unavailable.You will be able to keep the same codename so that the pages of your site won’t need to be updated but you will need to recreate your account.
Click here to recreate your account.
My stats for the last 14 months are gone. I wasn’t paying for the service on this account (I have for others), but I would be super pissed if I was. I’m not sure how you can make that up to customers. Consider this a lesson: back up.
While a slight diversion from the usual topics discussed here, I present to you an essay I wrote a few weeks ago on globalization. Specifically on what globalization will do to peace. It has a few interesting ideas, a bunch of not really interesting ideas, and a good point or two. It’s not amazing, but hopefully someone will get some use out of it now that I am done with it… It was for my intro to philosophy class and was pass or fail, I passed.
Read more
In the past few weeks I have had several people cite me as “John Gales”. This normally isn’t a big deal, John is a lot more common than Jon, so it happens in real life fairly often. But these instances have been online–in response to things I have said. For example, if I post a comment as “Jon Gales”, I might get a “Re: John Gales” or “John Gale’s” back. What the hell? Do you think I don’t know how to spell my OWN name? Anyone else have this problem?
(My name is technically Jonathan, but note that is not JoHnathan)