The title really says it all. Ward’s probably not my favorite industry luminary, but any loss by Microsoft, if you will. And you can’t argue that the wiki is a powerful notion.

There are the guys I talked about a week or two ago. This update proves my contention that there was a better way to implement this idea. I haven’t seen Cory tear them apart any further, so take that as some support of my view.

I guess I was not the only person to ding Fox Music for their DRM’ed, Windows only online release of the Firefly TV series soundtrack. I got an email from them this morning announcing the availability of MP3 files for Mac users. Mac, Linux or people who hate DRM, whatever, they did the right thing here. It is a shame they didn’t do it this way, first, but I’ve got my fix, so I ain’t gonna complain too hard.

OK, an unnamed but reliable source and I were have a discussion over lunch the other day. I contended that the importance of inheritance to OO has traditionally been hugely overstated. I went so far as to even suggest that for almost any problem to which a solution could be crafted using inheritance, I could craft an equally simple and effective solution using just composition.
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In case you still wondered whether the US patent system had issues, here’s an interesting article about the retention issues at the USPTO. Along with issues in the US copyright system, trends like these tell me that legislators and administrators have forgotten that patents were meant to be a limited reward for genuine invention. It is bad enough that the limited part is so easily overlooked, in the form of Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, but that starting in the late nineties and apparently continuing through today, we are now having issues around the genuine part.

I saw this at the Download Squad. I have been scratching my head over Mono for some time, now. But combining an already strange technology effort with a new bridge with Apple’s V/RAD framework? That just seems to be stretching things a bit further, and for what?
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Granted, this is still naught more than a rumor, but it seems increasingly credible. I forgot where I read it, but I recall some coverage of Microsoft vowing not to lose the portable video player market to Apple like they obviously feel they have the portable music player market.

I see only one problem with portable video…
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Started researching what is out there, in terms of consumer rights.

* From the FTC, some of the current laws on the books. Not so much on privacy or protection, per se.
* FTC list of links, more promising links, though the privacy area is pretty thin, as is the identity theft area.
* DigitalConsumer.org, not sure how active this is but seems to fill the need I have mentioned repeatedly in my podcasts.

Feel free to add to this list in the comments.

Boy, is this ever a troll. Might as well postulate that Apple will become a product-less company in twenty years, subsisting solely on brand cache.

A friend just told me the most horrifying thing. She just got a call from some random stranger. The caller claimed the new phone he bought from RadioShack had a bunch of data, including photos and address book entries, already in it. She backtracked and found out that her parents had just returned a phone they bought from RadioShack. So apparently, someone at the store thought it was sufficient to just re-box and re-sell the phone.