By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: April 25, 2006
Tuesday, 25 April 2006
- The Show With Ze Frank ★
-
It’s like a three- or four-minute-long concentrated, faster-cut, and more sarcastic version of The Daily Show. Absolutely fantastic. The archives go back about a month; I’m rationing them out at just a few a day. I predict this is going to make Ze Frank famous.
- Adium to Be a ‘Google Summer of Code’ Project ★
-
This means Google will pay for students to hack on Adium over the summer. (Via Jesper via email.)
- Blinksale 2.0 ★
-
Bunch of new features for the leading online invoicing app, including printing, recurring invoices, and filtering (including with tags).
- Windows Vista: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs ★
-
Jeff Atwood on the supposedly improved security model in Windows Vista:
The problem with the Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs school of thought is that it doesn’t work. All those earnest warning dialogs eventually blend together into a giant “click here to get work done” button that nobody bothers to read any more. The operating system cries wolf so much that when a real wolf — in the form of a virus or malware — rolls around, you’ll mindlessly allow it access to whatever it wants, just out of habit.
Mac OS X does a really, really good job balancing security and convenience; it sounds like with Vista, Windows is overcompensating and veering from “too convenient” to “too annoying”.
- Paul Thurrott: Where Vista Fails ★
-
Scathing look at the current Windows Vista betas from Paul Thurrott. I’m pretty much in agreement with Brian Tiemann on this; regarding Thurrott’s review, he writes:
I find myself hoping Vista comes out when they now say it will, and that it includes some features that Windows users can honestly crow about. The game of leapfrog is what makes the tech world flourish, and both sides need someone to try to jump over.
I.e. it’d be better for Mac users if Vista is actually pretty good.
- Why Does HAL Sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’? ★
-
Because Arthur C. Clark saw a synthesized speech demo at Bell Labs in 1962 where a computer sang that song. Kottke has a link to an audio clip. Update: Brad Smith emailed to point out that computer-music pioneer Max Mathews deserves some of the credit for that performance of “Daisy, Daisy”; it was Mathews’s arrangement, based on technology developed by Bell Labs’ John Kelly.
- MacBook Pro Pricing Oddities ★
-
The pricing on the new 17-inch MacBook Pros is quite curious. If you configure a build-to-order 15-inch MacBook with the 2.16 GHz processor — the same as the only available processor for the 17-inch MacBooks — the price is the same. E.g. for the exact same price of $2,799 you can get a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a bigger screen and larger hard drive. And, if you upgrade both machines to the 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drives and 2 GB of RAM, the 17-inch MacBook winds up $100 cheaper ($3099 vs. $3199).
Either the 15-inch MacBook Pros are due for a price cut, or something very strange is going on.
(Thanks to a bunch of readers who emailed about this.)
- Judges Take a Few Swipes at Apple’s Arguments ★
-
Howard Mintz reporting for the San Jose Mercury News:
But two of the three appeals court justices to hear Apple’s claims on Thursday suggested the company had not even shown that serious trade secrets had been revealed. “Asteroid” is a digital music device designed to work with Apple’s GarageBand music software.
“You don’t really claim this is some sort of new technology, do you?” Presiding Justice Conrad Rushing, a veteran of Silicon Valley trade secret fights, said to Apple’s Riley at one point. “This is plugging a guitar into a computer.”
- Philips Pays Time Inc. to Put Magazine Tables of Contents on Page 1 ★
-
You know how when you open a magazine and have to flip through 10 or 20 pages of ads to find the table of contents? As part of their “Simplicity” campaign, Philips Electronics is paying to have the tables of contents for several Time Inc. titles (e.g. Time and Fortune) right on page 1, where they should be.
I think what the magazine industry doesn’t like about these ads is that they draw attention to how reader-hostile the usual table-of-contents placement is.
(Via Kottke.)