More on the Sklyarov case. Elcomsoft's lawyer in the US has filed for dismissal. It certainly looks like Adobe has lost the taste for persecuting Sklyarov.

What's your hobbit / dwarf / elf / human / orc name?
One of mine comes out as Frappi. Nice to named after an iced coffee beverage, y'know...

Oooh. Shiny toy! I want one of these.
A very innovative means of inputting text. i wouldn't be surprised if this made its way into mobile phones. i'm also surprised that Sony, with its Jog Dial, hasn't already got there. In the mean time, I'm very, very impressed. And searching for spare change down the back of the sofa...

Cool stuff underway in the People's Republic of China - reported by Politech. Nikkei is reporting that several DVD manufacturers in Japan are considering action against Chinese DVD manufacturers, who they say have ripped off technology. Surprising bearing in mind Japanese clone manufacturers' attitudes to making plug compatibles, as documented in Ferguson and Morris' seminal Computer Wars.
Anyway, the point put forward by Nathan Cochrane, a journalist from The Age, an Australian national paper, is that the Chinese players are popular, not least because they aren't as prescriptive as more regulated players from other markets.
I'll post a link to the actual Politech mail once it's archived on Politechbot.

Looks like Dot Com type Kay Hammond is actually going to
do the marriage thing with the winner of her auction last year. Looks like £251,000 can buy you love. or at least a pre-nuptial agreement.

Wow. Stunning horse / bonfire pic. Bit dubious about the idea of riding a horse through a bonfire, though. Slightly gruesome.

I forgot to link to a story about Amazon turning a profit. Silly me....

Whoa. Global Crossing has filed for bankruptcy protection. George Gilder might have to economise on his jogging shoe habit from now on.
Looks like the company has been bailed out at least in part by Hutchison Whampoa. Another company that is ...interesting. But they're doing some interesting stuff with 3G mobile in the UK at the moment - namely, holding a licence, and buying airtime from other providers. Which could be a smart idea.

Bidding for copies of the Enron Ethics manual is hotting up.

Prof. Roger Scruton. Visiting professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. Columnist in many newspapers, and contributor to the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the FT. Member of the panel of The Moral Maze, broadcast on radio Four. Oh, and he also seems to have been taking £4,500 a month from a Japanese tobacco company to pimp ciggies in his columns.

Only from Bungie, makers of Halo and Oni: Pimps at Sea.

Attention marketing personnel! Should you be applying for this job?

More Marmite fun (and flaky cod psychology) from the New York Times.

Looks like Enron's CEO has found himself a new job already. Well, according to SatireWire, anyway...

If someone were to nick your sister's computer, what would you do? In the case of this chap, who had a good knowledge of AppleScript, you use her Timbuktu install to find the computer in question and lojack it back from 'em.

Dan Gillmor has a good old look at what Netscape is hoping to achieve in its lawsuit against Microsoft.

Investment bank CSFB has been fined US$100 million by the NASD and the SEC for "taking millions of dollars from customers in inflated commissions in exchange for allocations of "hot" Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)." It is always interesting to see which banks are enthusing about particular stocks.

One for all you beer lovers out there. How close are you to your first love?

'ello Paul Rogers, how are you?

Many thanks to StimpSoft™ for the wonderful Frogslapper POP reader. Without this, the evil that is Tiscali would have prevented my missus from picking up her mail entriely. Now we know that Tiscali just don't care about their customers. The bastards.
Oh, and check out StimpSoft's Canadian site as well...

Reason Number 182 for not eating Nachos and cheese as your main evening meal:
I dreamt I was on a train to San Francisco with my old flatmate. We ended up in a railway carriage with Hunter S Thompson and a bunch of technology journalists I had either worked with or know socially. Thompson told me I was losing it. I fully understood this when we got to some sort of railway station (it looked like one from Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar) and I went to get my suit carrier. God knows why. It was one carriage along, but this part of the train was still moving. So I didn't pick up the suit carrier and left it on the train.
Then I got seperated from Jon and my girlfriend, who were over with Jon's parents (who live in Scotland) waiting for me to stop talking to the dot com CEO (I won't say who) who was now selling Mexican jumping beans in the station lobby.
I ended up wandering through a bit of SF I have no recollection of at all. There were plenty of biker gangs, but none of them had seen my bags and they were all very friendly and polite.
Then I found the missus, Jon and Jon's parents at a bike shop. It was a tiny shop - sort of like a bike shop I used to go to in Glasgow - in the front room of an Edwardian terraced house, sort of like the ones in Cardiff. Caroline was looking at a Hello kitty road bike in gloss white and pink. Even the Campag Helios wheels were white, with little kittens on the white gloss braking surface. That was pretty disturbing...
Enough. I'm going to stay of the cheese and salsa for a while.

Somone should tell Yahoo that it linked to the wrong media for this Adam Ant story. NTK already has, of course....

After nearly thirty years of development, it's good to see that industrial designers are completely capable of producing the most damn ugly designs to ever curse your desktop.
The Groom Lake, in particular, looks like the bastard son of a DSLAM, a Mac G3 desktop and a 50's kitchen utensil.

Looks like Orange are having a few problems with production at the moment. Michael Bonney has explained why in a very frank and honest manner - which is cool.
What he has done fits in very well with the Cluetrain Manifesto. And possibly with the Gluetrain Manifesto as well...

My eMate has turned up - after a monstering from ParcelForce - and I promptly started a kernel panic on my PowerBook by trying to network the two together with IRda. Doh!
Never mind. Much config fun. Damn, it's a cool toy...

Well, well, well. Looks like David Coursey has decided to give the Mac another whirl after his criticism of the new iMac. I get the feeling he'll probably enjoy a month of Macness, but he'll want to go back to the PC at the end of it.
Two words: Samba and Fire, the best, if not the only multi-protocol chat client for the Mac. It does AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC and ICQ all in one handy package.

Yay! Bike mag is publishing Ferrentino's column online. He always was one of the best reasons for buying the mag...

The New York Times* on all that Time / iMac bother. Did Time sell out? NYT doesn't seem too convinced.

*You'll need to fill in a free subscription form - which is a pain.

Which pre-1985 video game character are you?

Many thanks to George Bush, who sent in this lovely animation. George should be very proud. He used his crayons under adult supervision, of course.

Interesting take on Common Language Runtime at Slashdot. CLR is already pretty damn important in terms of .Net and Sun ONE. Talk to Sun, and they'll say some pretty unsavoury things about CLR.
On the one hand, .Net is pretty open, and on the other, it's a good way for Microsoft to build toll booths. The other thing is that Sun is out to protect Java any way it can. And somewhere in the middle are all those who aren't fussed, but want to be able to use something that isn't platform dependent. It's gonna be a biggie, kids...

Blimey - Spatula City still exists! Of course, I had to go and press the Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything. Ah, how I long for those days of Radiohead, bad haircuts, riding five days in a row because it was reading week and greasy spoon breakfasts at Ramon's in Cathays...

David Coursey takes a swing at Apple's new iMac on ZDNet. His argument is basically that it'll never work because you can't get access to multiple FireWire and USB ports (Er, check the back of it, Dave) and flat panels never were popular with consumers anyway. The last is a good point; as he points out, flat panels haven't been popular on desktop PCs recently, not least because of the extra expense. This will change - viz the extraordinay growth in laptop sales. It's also worth noting that PC sales have slumped across the industry, which might partially explain slow sales.
That said, NEC|Mitsubshi in the UK says it's monitor sales comprised of around 70% flat panel LCDs last year. Admittedly, they concentrate on the mid-to-high end of the market, but it's still an interesting number.
Various panel manufacturers went out to grab LCD land last year, dropping prices to the point that manufacturers couldn't resist. They're now putting prices back up. LCDs are awful for anything that needs colour consistency - page layout, image manipulation and video postproduction are examples - but if they (and OLEDs, the next big thing) get cheap enough, then they will replace CRTs in many cases. I'm writing this on a laptop with a 14" TFT, and the big old 20" AppleVision to my right is switched off and dormant.
The second part of Coursey's article attacks Apple for squeezing the press. Basically, they gave an exclusive to Time (owned by AOL/Time/Warner) and told others (including Mr Coursey) that no-one had been pre-briefed.
Coursey is right to be miffed at Apple for what they pulled, but he's getting back at them in a very personal way, and he's using the iMac as a rather obvious little brother to beat up.
I don't like what Apple has done with it's launches. I thought the hype was excessive - and disappointment inevitable. I thought the iMac ugly - although it moves better than it looks, and I'm tempted to reconsider. It's still very expensive, and I'm glad they're hanging onto the old CRT iMacs at lower prices.
At the end of the day, Coursey's article says more about how he goes about getting news and exclusives than it does about Apple.

A review on kuro5hin.org of iPhoto and iTunes. A pretty good look at the two of 'em.
I've had a couple of days after the keynote to think this all over, and try out iPhoto. I'm using a Pismo PowerBook, so OS X can be slow - visually - but no slower than SuSE PPC running KDE. iPhoto is a good example of this, although I must admit to being pretty impressed at how quickly iPhoto can scroll through the 300 - odd pics I've imported into it. That said, add titles or film scroll numbers, and it quickly slows down.

{sniff} Ever long for the good old days of late '93, when Spatula City was a famous site and stuff like Cycling.org was still up and churning out mail groups? The Internet Pizza Server has been churning out something good for your nerve endings since 1994 and has had over a million visitors. Good to see they've (mostly) stuck to the cause with ASCII and good 'old cheesy gifs. Ah, nostalgia. It's not what it used to be.

Just posted to Politech: Save Unicom.Com. Don't you just hate it when someone with lawyers and no right to use them (or scissors - without adult supervision) gets all enthusiastic?

"I bring this all up because now Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ``most reliable Windows ever.'' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ``the most articulate vegetable ever.''

Is it me, or is the new iMac rather, er, ugly?
According to the lead story in Time Canada (now removed) Jobs will introduce iPhoto as well.
Hmm.
Find out in a couple of hours...

Well, Epson have lost another customer. Apart from telling OS X users to 'buy another Epson printer that's supported,' they have continued to go slow or not support printers.
Lucky, some enterprising bods have noticed that you can hack up some servicable drivers. Good for them.
Sorry Epson, you just lost me as a customer. If it takes a couple of bods a few hours to write a decent driver for one of you printers without support, it surely wouldn't take that long for your engineers to knock one up. And it would keep us Mac users happy...

"Though unarguably catchy, its meaning is somewhat unclear; fundamentally, however, it appears to be extolling the companionship of yeast."

More from Rachel: Lambs On Line. They all rock - nothing like the Lean Muscular Sheep we saw stranded in fields with little to eat during the F&M crisis this year.

You too can look like Kenny Rogers

Rah Rah for Apple and their hype wagon. We're going to find out what they're all so pumped up abouton Monday. But in the mean time, Dave Winer has an interesting viewpoint on what will be announced. Basically a tablet-ish sort of device that will allow you to take a light, thin computing device around the house with you.
A few problems, however: 802.11a, a wireless networking standard offering 54Mbps over 802.11b's 11Mbps has not been approved in Europe. Offer 'a' and you're ruling out Europe. Offer 'b', and people will complain they're being ripped off (Especially in the US, where 'a' has been happily cleared by the FCC and is about to debut.)
Secondly, 3Com launched and then ditched the Audrey, a similar device.
Okay, 3Com didn't do it properly, but other things, such as a relatively high price, put paid to it. If Apple are going to launch an iDock, it'd better be cheap as hell.

This Squirrel Can Eat Your House. Er...

"I don't imagine many 2.5' pigs being able to protest much to the Lord of the Sith." Worthy - I always did wonder what on earth the elephant in the bar in Star Wars was all about. Well now I know...

Prawnzilla Vs Citrus Sheep I especially like the courgettes. Thanks Rachel!

This made me laugh (and get a bit worried). "Now, he could have been a girl, but he lacked the necessary equipment; a functional brain and dignity."

I haven't been able to play with this yet, as the site has been swamped. But if you want to cruise through census figures from England in 1901, go here.

Happy New Year! The SO and I lasted until 4.30am at a party in Brighton hosted by all round nice chaps Chris and Stuart, and finally climbed back into the car to travel back home at 2.30pm today. At the moment my brain hurts. Bring on the Gumby brain surgeons...