Thursday, October 12, 2006

CNN: "The chief of the British Army has called for a pullout of British troops from Iraq." 

The Amish have the right idea, they demolished the school where last week's tragedy took place. We should be so smart about what we call Ground Zero. Don't build a shrine there. Don't make a point of the place. Leave a hole there. Put in a park, with benches, and swings. Build a minor league baseball stadium. A venue for concerts. Don't build another skyscraper. Don't be defiant. Accept the deaths and let's move on. No more shrines. No more global war on terror. We're not the most important people on the planet.  

A few years back we wrote about cars with interfaces for MP3 players, and now they're starting to make them. That's good. Okay, the next thing is to put fractional horsepower HTTP servers on board, with simple programming interfaces (I like XML-RPC because it interfaces easily with every programming language, but lower-level interfaces would be okay, just more work for the programmer). While you're at it, home theater systems should also have HTTP servers with programmable interfaces, so I can write a script on my desktop computer to move stuff over to the hard disk on the music system. Oh that's right they don't have hard disks. Add one, okay? They're really cheap. 

The home theater system I bought, it's a turnkey system, recommended highly by CNET, connects to my iPod, and I like that! The system doesn't have its own hard disk, but it connects to one of mine. That's a good place to start. But their software is totally lo-rez, and how are they going to upgrade it without a net connection? At some point we'll stop buying electronics if it doesn't have easy connectivity to the systems we already have. That's why I bought a Mac Mini for my new TV, so I could find the points of frustration, where it drives me crazy that I can't connect two things together that should be able to connect.  

AppleInsider: "Owners of Apple Computer's new 13-inch MacBook notebooks, whose systems are plagued by intermittent shutdown issues, have become fed up with extended repair times and inadequate resolutions to the problem, and are now organizing a class action lawsuit against the Mac maker." 

WSJ: "Does YouTube make Google a big target for copyright suits?" 

Bryan Schappel: "This topic came up during the first hour of the Howard Stern show on the 10th. Howard said that loads of his material has been uploaded without permission and Artie Lange said that his DVD's have also been uploaded without permission. Both of them agree that Google will be a prime target for copyright lawsuits." 

AppleInsider: "Apple Computer has been granted a patent for a pretermitted feature of Mac OS X that would have allowed users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac."