- Verizon Wireless rants, raves, and whines about how the FCC regulation for wireless local number portability–letting you keep your same phone number, even when you change providers–is going to cost billions and billions of dollars. Despite the fact that the FCC regulation has been in place for years and wireless providers have chosen to ignore it, since the FCC has failed to enforce it.
- Take the FCC to court over the issue!
- After the court rules against you, give in and announce that you’re going to lead the industry and everyone should copy you, because by Zeus, you’re doing what’s best for the customer. (But only after being forced to…)
Month: June 2003
- Buy the Baby Einstein CD set. (Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and Bach)
- Rip all 4 CDs to MP3 with iTunes.
- Copy all 4 sets of MP3s to your iPod.
- Now you can use your Aiwa noise-canceling headphones plugged in to the iPod and situated on the wife’s abdomen to let your developing little son listen to the classics, proven to beneficially stimulate neural development.
So how far would you go to promote your own personal brand? Some people nab custom license plates to slap on their vehicles in their respective states. Thanks to the Acme License Maker, now you too can experiment with self-branding for your personal transport. (Please bear in mind that I do not know the rules for number of characters allowed in the states shown.)
For instance, I could get:
Michael might prefer:
Or maybe he’d like:
Jason could go with:
Brad and Mena could promote their new venture with:
I know Lee has a custom Macintosh Florida plate, but would he slap on DTPBYLEE, provided Florida allowed all of those characters?
Just some fun food for thought…
John Trever, Alburquerque, New Mexico, 19 June 2003
(Thanks, Rick)
Marc Marshall brings up the excellent point that Microsoft has come full circle with regard to Internet Explorer. His is the last post in Macintouch’s Browser Future report for today:
The bottom line in this situation is this: For the past several years, Microsoft gave away a free browser to kill the competition, and succeeded. Now, they have stopped development of their standalone product, and are giving people exactly three choices to get their “standard” product: 1) Buy Windows. 2) Use MSN for Internet access. 3) Pay them $10/month or $80 per year. No free options, no free upgrades.
The price is higher than Opera or Omni’s paid competition, and you don’t have a free option, and you have an ongoing fee. In fact, if MS starts charging annual licensing for Windows, there will be no lifetime-licence-purchasable version of IE. This sounds like exactly the sort of consumer hostile situation that monopolies create, and governments are supposed to protect us from.
Now that they’ve pretty much saturated the market, Microsoft has been scrambling on how to consistently generate revenue. They have long discussed subscription software licensing, and this situation with IE appears to be the first shot across the bow. Unfortunately, I do not forsee the mass sheep of Windows and IE/Mac users torpedoing the Microsoft Bismarck any time soon.
Presidential hopeful John Kerry is running around the country talking about renewable energy, like wind and solar power, proposing we get 20% of all our energy from renewable sources by 2020. He calls it “Twenty by ’20,” or something to that effect. Yeah, I suppose that’s something I could get behind. Having seen the big wind farm at South Point on the Big Island of Hawai’i (the southernmost tip of the United States, and quite a windy locale), I think that if there’s a suitable windy location, yeah, put up a wind farm. It won’t provide all of the energy a population might need, but it would certainly help.
But will the Senator bow to the liberal elite on the proposed Camp Wind windmill farm on Horseshoe Shoal, seven miles off Nantucket Island? Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard residents are complaining that the wind farm will ruin their respective views. Awwww, po’ wittle ewitists. They whine and complain about getting away from fossil fuel consumption, but when offered the chance to do so in their own backyard, they don’t want it because it’s not aesthetically pleasing. Seems someone wants to have it both ways.
Myron Ebell, of the free-market environmental think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute:
bq. “People think if you live in the right area you don’t have to put up with anything. Well, where are they going to get their energy? From little squirrels in wheels?”
(Thanks, Rick)
Bare Bones has released v2.0 of my favorite email client. Major kudos to Michael for getting SpamSieve bundled with all Mailsmith 2.0 purchases (before 31 July 2003).
Speaking of which, SpamSieve 1.3.1 has been released. Seems to be a bit faster to me, and I like the new script addition that sends a piece of mail directly to the Trash when I mark it as spam. (I have the Mailsmith filter that SpamSieve’s script uses set to send spam to the Trash; others have a spam folder, so your mileage may vary.)
If you’re already using both of these products, here’s the kicker regarding Mailsmith 2.0: it features direct integration with SpamSieve! No more scripts or filters! Rock on, Michael! Way to go!
Ok, not really, but it’s really ticking me off. Why is it that my site validates as XHTML 1.0 Trans, validates as CSS2, looks perfectly fine in Safari, Camino, even IE5/Mac, yet looks like complete dung in IE6? I know, I know, IE6 doesn’t fully support the CSS2 spec, yet, so I’m sure that’s playing a huge role. I suppose I could drop it to CSS1, but I’d rather be posting than fiddling with making the site look exactly the same in Microsloth’s stupid Windows browser.
In Microsucks’ defense, there are some font issues with the site in Firebird, but at least pages scroll properly in that browser. I haven’t tried Opera for Windows yet.
Speaking of the dress-code-aware genius that is Dan Benjamin (is that enough, Dan?), he offers up some delectable food for thought on the discontinuation of standalone IE development for the Mac. I say standalone, because it seems that IE will continue on in MSN for Mac OS X.
Zeldman sums it all up rather well.
From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. They may even gain in market share. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if most of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.
But enough, and enough, and enough. We are glad of the latest versions of Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Safari, and Omniweb. But on this grey and rainy day, this news of a kind of death brings no warmth. To Tantek and Jimmy and their colleagues on the IE/Mac team: for what you achieved on behalf of web standards and usability, much respect.
When it arrived, IE5/Mac was the standard for web browsers. It shamed Netscape. Complacency and stagnant development, however, have left it behind technologically. Zeldman mentions reasons people switched from IE to Camino or Safari; I switched for all the reasons he discusses, including that it’s one less Microsoft application on my system. There are choices people, and they’re better than the “standard.”
If you’ve ever been interested in how your email gets from your computer to someone else’s, or how your browser knows how to load up a web site, you need to read Dan Benjamin’s excellent DNS primer at MacDevCenter. It’s geared toward Mac OS X users, but anyone can learn the basics of DNS, IP addresses, routing, and all that other techie stuff that makes the Internet work, boiled down in to simply terms by Mr. Benjamin (of Hivelogic/Hiveware fame).
Oh, and hire this dress-code-aware guy, if you have the need. Too much talent to not be getting paid well by someone, somewhere.