news from the web

“Simplifying Tasks” is a cool poster about ease of use and simplifying tasks, its just too bad that the people that made their web pages obviously haven’t understood the concept. IBM – Ease of Use – Simplifying Tasks Check out the “easy” ordering “link” they are using :-D

Doc Searls and John Dowdell is two of many that have picked up on the interesting linking policy over at NPR.org What are organizations thinking when they start to tell people to ask for permission before linking? And what are they doing about various search engines, such as Google? Not to mention, what legal options do they have to enforce their prohibition to link to npr.org? [Update] Wired have an article about NPR.org and their deep linking policy as well as the response from the weblog community. [Update II] A

Not quite, but Nando Times reports that Australian scientists claim to have ‘teleported’ a laser beam

I promise that I won’t be peddeling politics on my weblog. But this statement on the war on terror from some prominent americans deserves some attention: We won’t deny our consciences

The Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center has chosen to use Flash to make a fun animation about the CBDTPA, but the issue is serious enough. Big media corporations are trying to take away ownership from the consumers and make you and me pay for every single version of a digital work we consume. Imagine having to pay 4 times to have the same song on a CD, your MP3 player, your own CD-compilation for the car and on your computer. That is what Disney and others in reality is trying

At the beginning of this month OpenOffice released version 1.0 of their office suite. I haven’t had the time to check it out before now. I used to use Sun’s StarOffice (which is now out in version 6.0, selling for about 80 dollars). OpenOffice 1.0 is an impressive package, and is replacing StarOffice 5.2 on my system. Its available for all Linux, Solaris and Windows. For Mac OS X there is a beta available. OpenOffice 1.0 is noticably faster to start than StarOffice 5.2, and its not trying to pretend

How Microsoft Went After Linux Kempin recommended that computer makers who were not “friendly” with Microsoft should be hit “harder than in the past with anti-Linux actions.” Somehow I am neither shocked nor surprised.

The battle in the courts move on, and this time Macromedia scores. Yahoo – Macromedia Wins Patent Counterclaims Trial Against Adobe Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR – News) today announced that a jury ruled in its favor in a counterclaims suit against Adobe Systems. The verdict included a damage award of $4.9 million. Macromedia intends to ask the court to issue an injunction to stop Adobe’s infringement, and also intends to appeal the verdict in the initial Adobe case. … “The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero,” said

Seems it is wise to stay far away from Verisign. On a related note, we have been moving domains from Verisign for a while at Webhead since Verisign has failed to supply us with anything resembling an ISP tool. We did however consider using them for our own and clients payment systems, but reading horror stories like the one above has made me think twice about doing business with them.