Cox Crow

Change Management

Sometimes you find out about a bone-headed decision upstream from you, that's already being applied company-wide — a decision that makes work harder, more expensive, and less effective overall. It's ostensibly security-related, but most likely doesn't perform the function assigned to it. Given the corporate culture, there's no apparent way to roll back the decision.

There's something wrong here.

5:29:23 PM # Google It!

.org top-level domain re-assignment shenanigans

Aaron Swartz notes some things about ICANN's not choosing the IMS/ISC bid to manage the .org TLD, over that of the Internet Society.

icann.blog has been ticked off wondering about this as well.

I haven't read through the bids, so I can't comment on them. However, I do think that the use of the .org space has been perverted from its original intent. (Bear in mind that I'm saying this as someone who bought a .net domain, though I'm not a network access provider, because the domain is intended for my home network.) There are some idiocies in the TLD structure, but unrestricted poaching in trying to make a profit from the .org space doesn't solve them.

4:04:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration

Not unlike a cat's purr

I [Jeff Darcy] finally found an actual recording of a platypus! [Canned Platypus]

3:41:39 PM # Google It!

Sad Mac

The "Happy Mac" that users have become accustomed to seeing at startup has been replaced by a light grey screen with a dark grey Apple logo in the center.
— MacCentral

1:59:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Low-Hanging Fruit

Remember, remember the Fifth of November

The only chance that we have to influence the legislators is to use our smaller gravitational fields in a unified way.  To do that we have to put aside our differences.  I don't know code, but I know the legal system.  And guys, let me tell you, we are the unarmed amatuers venturing into a well fortified military encampment.  Let's find some common ground here.  And quickly.
[Ernie the Attorney]

The fifth is the first Tuesday in November: Election Day.

The fifth is also, coincidentally enough, Guy Fawkes Day.

1:40:49 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics

I'm trying to find an Utne Reader article on how software licenses dilute the concept of property, but haven't yet. I read it in the University of Richmond library while attending the Virginia Governor's School for the Humanities in the summer of 1987 or 1988. There are only a limited number of issues to choose from, but the indices don't seem to be online. Time to check the library.

1:27:52 PM #

Jazz

Listening to the Sex Mob's rendition of Freebird.

In the world envisioned by our friends in Hollywood, there is no jazz.

12:25:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Media

Gun, Bullet, Foot

LawMeme's Ernest Miller outpoints Slate's "Hit Charade: the music industry's self-inflicted wounds".

In 1980, when the same sort of listener burnout bedeviled the biz and its superstars, salvation came from an unexpected source: MTV, an upstart cable channel that began broadcasting clips by a new generation of British bands simply because the established U.S. performers weren't yet making video clips. Groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran, and the Clash—whose label didn't even release the original version of its first album in the United States till 2000—broke through to a novelty-starved audience. Suddenly, home taping wasn't an issue anymore.

This is just the sort of shock that the music industry needs—and labors so hard to prevent.

12:13:47 PM # Google It!
categories: Media

Freebird!

NPR's All Things Considered considered the guy who shouts Freebird!

11:50:16 AM # Google It!
categories: Media

Intellectual Property != Property

11:40:29 AM #
categories: Industry, Law, Media