Need To Know 2003-03-07

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"Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic..." - JIM ALLCHIN, VP in charge of MS Windows, has one of those "if you could index the URLs I've seen with my eyes" moments http://news.google.com/news?q=allchin+google >> HARD NEWS << from the house of clues Time was when the music industry could just put any old rubbish in a press release and have the media and MPs parrot it verbatim the next day. That time, of course, was last week. This week, however, things are looking just a little better. MPs debating the Communications Bill on Tuesday got sidetracked into an almost honest discussion of "internet piracy". With all the sleek coolness of dancefloor dads, they found themselves admitting to unauthorised home-taping in their crazy, reprobate past. And if you can plough through the high-larious puns on constituency names and reams of rote concern over our creative industries and the moral decline of youth, there's actually a faint whiff of clue hanging over the proceedings. They can't remember his name, but Jon Johansen is cited as the devisor of a Linux DVD reader. Micropayments are touted, "apocalyptic visions" are dismissed, the EUCD sceptically eyed. Now all we have to do is set them up an internal phpforum where they can fair-use photoshop each other's publicity photos, and then they'll really start to understand. http://tinyurl.com/71fm - listening to Showaddywaddy on their "iPod devices" http://ukcdr.org/files/press-releases/20030307_debunking_the_piracy_myth.txt - still fighting the good info-fight POPBITCH are asking for money again - blimey, that UKP2500 they raised from their last server appeal (April 2001) didn't last very long, did it? To be honest, we prefer this approach to the alternative of trying to get readers to subscribe to something with no guarantee of how long it'll keep going (apparently the current business model for Salon), but most people who go for a "tip jar" revenue stream at least try to give some indication of where your money is going. You know: bandwidth, unexpected credit card bills, breast enlargements, that sort of thing. Popbitch has classified and banner ads, high-class web hosting at a nuclear bunker, an "office" in London's fashionable Farringdon, and a founder who is now editor of EMAP's "The Face" magazine, just down the road in EC1. But all they tell you for their new appeal is the vague muttering that the site "needs money to continue". You know, if they'd just say they needed a fancy showbiz lawyer to keep them out of jail for another year, our cheque would already be in the post. http://www.popbitch.com/appeal/ - vs http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/23/1830217 http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02001-04-20&l=231#l - and we never got to the bottom of this free hosting thing http://www.thefridaything.co.uk/comparison.shtml - just wondering how b3ta would measure up It's nice to see the BBC's new media wing make at least a partial show of publishing their license-funded research for the rest of the industry (who pay their license fees too - well, most of them). Like, for instance, their recent Accessibility study which took some hard-hitting looks at the BBC's own reach to those with disabilities or just really dumb terminals. It's actually quite a decent Nielsenesque overview of why every site should be accessible in a usefully pointy-headed prose. Stuff you've been trying to tell your boss for ages - like the evils of wanton javascript, Flash, colour schemes, and PDF files. Admittedly, the research is only meant for "suppliers" to the sprawling media duchy, not riff-raff looking to scam tips for their own shamefully commercial ventures - but hey, no-one's stopping you, right? Well, apart from the BBC themselves. The BBC put it all in PDF format. Gee, good thing they're not expecting any disabled suppliers to help out, isn't it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/bbci/ - you could pitch a show called "I'm a lynx user, get me out of here" www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/bbci/pdf/BBCi_Accessibility_Study_7-10-02.pdf - those URLs could do with a trim too >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious NIKE UK's "Sweatshop" outlet located somewhere between Ipswich and Birmingham: http://www.ntk.net/2003/03/07/dohnike.gif ... 419 not found: http://www.nigeriapolice.org/rights.html ... for one week only, the return of PUERILE GOOGLE MISSPELLINGS: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22earrings+per+share%22 , "Rouge Trader", "Rouge Trooper", "Widows XP" plus - for you classical scholars - "Res Pubica". Also, ill-timed snapshot ahoy: http://www.google.com/search?q=dooyoo+pure ... make Georgia senators ANGRY about musical! Georgia senators SMASH!: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/enquirer/news/opinion/5281218.htm ... standards of both literacy *and propriety* appear to be under threat: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030303/80/dujmc.html ... pick "Chelsea" as "Your Loved Team" to get SMS libel by phone: http://lifeanddeath.sportsmessage.co.uk/examples.shtml ... learn all about how Tim Berners-Lee created the internet: http://open-site.org/Computers/Internet/Programming/Languages/HTML/ - then search for "." to get every article on the server... give 'em an inch, and those pesky terrorists'll take 1000mm: http://www.ready.gov/faq.html ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Due to immense public demand - and in accordance with NTK prophecy - another date has been added to the nation-wide IG NOBEL PRIZE TOUR (8pm next Fri 2003-03-14, Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Oxford, UKP1 for non-members of Science Soc), handily coinciding with the election of a new University Chancellor there (the Vice-Chancellor has ruled that "gowns need not be worn" to either occasion, you'll be reassured to hear). Oxford professor of fundamentalist-taunting RICHARD DAWKINS, oddly, doesn't appear to be part of "National Science Week" [see last NTK] when he delivers the first Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture QUEERER THAN WE CAN SUPPOSE: THE STRANGENESS OF SCIENCE (7:30pm, Tue 2003-03-11, the Royal Institution, London W1, UKP15), with a raffle and auction in aid of endangered animal charities Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. And, as if to support at least the second part of Dawkins' thesis, KEVIN WARWICK's tireless "I, Cyborg" roadshow forms the post-AGM entertainment for the IEEE UKRI Section the following day (6.45pm, Wed 2003-03-12, Royal Commonwealth Society, London WC1, free) before, we understand, heading off to give potentially unsuitable ideas to the research staff of IBM Hursley (Thu March 2003-03-13). http://www.savetherhino.org./index.php?id=187 - RD: "Apple Computer has lost its most eloquent apologist" http://www.ieee.org.uk/event.html#AGM - IBM event not open to public, and/or "bags of mostly water" http://users.ox.ac.uk/~science/details/ht03.html#Abrahams - vs http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/030124.shtml http://www.retrovision.org.uk/ - this weekend: another retro-Yakfest, in an Oxford pub http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/events/ - followed by an Edinburgh Uni lecture on copyright >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Rael Dornfest's blogging utility BLOSXOM is Perl code written as when the world was young, and Perl code had something to prove: two hundred lines of yogically back-bent hack designed to do one thing, and do it well. You have a directory. The text files in the directory are your blog entries, sorted by timestamp. Pop a few HTML templates in there, and Blosxom CGIs it all into a viewable page complete with permalinks and other blog miscellany. Now with the imminent arrival of BLOSXOM 2.0, the script has developed "look at me! I can put my whole fist in my mouth!" extensibility. The new Blosxom plugins API is just a wodge of Perl packages that support a handful of obvious callbacks and tootle with variables. But it works - well enough to have spawned over fifty extensions to the basic app, from automatic smartquotes to trackbacks to debian package tags. The main script is still just your bog-standard CGI script (though it can now generate static as well as dynamic blog pages), and you're still just sticking text files in directories (although sub-directories now work like fancy-schmancy Moveable Type-like categories). It's blogging if blogging was a shell command - right down to its unpronounceable name. http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/ - it's some OS X thing http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/plugins - unfortunately the current search needs java http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlehks/ - from the hacker who brought you >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ ROYSTON VASEY currently #1191 at bringing local ADSL to local people: http://www.broadbandleague.org/complete11.html ... and you thought BT had a negative attitude towards broadband: http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/images/izd-0010a.jpg ( via http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/showleaflets.asp ) ... any idea why sci.military.moderated is so quiet nowadays? ... GOOGLE NEWS' wide range of global sources now include CBBC NEWSROUND: http://news.google.com/news?q=bush+nasty ... at last - a webpage showing you what "the Internet" looks like: http://www.durhamcountylibrary.org/training/Whatdoes.html ... http://www.perryhoberman.com/accept/html/infringement.html - though you can still use "Have a break" legally (for now): http://www.legalday.co.uk/lexnex/keeble03/keeble020103.htm ... http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20030222/etc_habrashi.html after http://www.dct-net.co.jp/special/img/usbhot.gif ... "Women 'wired for worry'" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/2814893.stm while, just a couple of years ago, they could "cope better with stress": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1657579.stm - both studies summarily rubbished by Professor Stephen Bloom... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> C5 follows up Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden" hypothesis that human-primate crossbreeds might be possible in THE HUMAN CHIMP (9pm, Fri, C5)... SUBMARINE DISASTER (10pm, Fri, C5) covers underwater nuclear calamities from the USS Thresher to the Russian Navy's Kursk... and "Swordfish" writer Skip Woods directs his own hilariously amoral domestic drug-dealer script THURSDAY (2.05am, Fri, C4)... "The West Wing" is shunted off to the prestigious Monday 11pm slot, to be replaced by sure- fire Saturday night ratings winner DNA: THE STORY OF LIFE (7pm, Sat, C5)... we say: put http://www.garylestrange.co.uk/ on the bus for '80s popstar reality show REBORN IN THE USA (9.35pm, Sat, ITV)... and toxic industrial pollution week sees CORRESPONDENT: POISONED CITY (6.15pm, Sun, BBC2) precede worthy but sentimental one-woman's-struggle weepie ERIN BROKOVICH (9pm, Mon, C5)... Inquirer writer and folk singer Wendy M Grossman once advised that NTK "has" to see Spike Jonze/ Charlie Kaufman's typically self-indulgent indie curio BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (10pm, Sun, C4)... Catherine Keener and Aaron Eckhart both re-appear in Neil LaBute's typically brutal "In the Company of Men" follow-up YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS (12.05am, Mon, C4)... and lifestyle makeover shows get down to the real basics in the self-explanatorily titled HOW TO ROB A BANK (9pm, Mon, C4)... Rob "That's you, that is" Newman is the subject of novelist profile SCRIBBLING (11.20pm, Mon, BBC2)... and never mind disappointing insect teen romance sequels like THE FLY II (10.10pm, Thu, C5), there's a rare chance to see the original TV pilot movie for David McCallum's THE INVISIBLE MAN (2.20pm, Thu, C5)... FILM>> it's undeniably intriguing to see a "forbidden" romance being made in such a deliberately old-fashioned format, but that's enough about J-Lo/ Ralph-Fi comedy MAID IN MANHATTAN ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/maidinmanhattan.htm : neither in the true "Cinderella" were the homosexual euphemisms, the adultery, the exhibitionism, nor the excessive breast exposure) - the usual mild anachronisms fail to detract from 1950s-style unironic "Pleasantville" experiment FAR FROM HEAVEN ( http://www.imdb.com/Goofs?0297884 : the Tupperware container [Julianne "Hannibal" Moore brings to [Dennis "Innerspace" Quaid's] office is a post '62 color and style)... otherwise it looks like a limited release for '90s-nostalgia Britpop hagiography LIVE FOREVER ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : contains strong language and drug references)... or a rather more uncompromising look at the emptiness of celebrity, nudity -packed "Hogan's Heroes" behind-the-scenes expose AUTO FOCUS ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/auto_focus.html : it's possible the film could entice some kids to videotape sexual encounters and/or become more interested in pornography)... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "martyrs to the cause" http://www.cathnews.com/news/302/116.php NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? Mail ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2003 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Full license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.