By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 7, 2008
Monday, 7 January 2008
- Financial Times: Paramount to Switch to Blu-Ray, Killing HD DVD ★
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Matthew Garrahan and Mariko Sanchanta reporting for The Financial Times:
Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.
[…] Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Brothers backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.
(In case you missed it, Warner Brothers did just that last week.)
- Nikon D3 / D300 vs. Canon ★
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Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has a terrific comparison of Nikon’s and Canon’s latest DSLR camera bodies. The key is that he was a long-time Nikon user in the film era, switched to Canon 8 years ago because of Canon’s then-enormous lead in digital technology, and recently bought a complete Nikon kit, including both D3 and D300 bodies.
- Usable Keychain Scripting 1.0b3 ★
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Leopard and Intel compatibility update to Daniel Jalkut’s excellent freeware tool for accessing keychain entries from AppleScript.
- NYT: Xerox Hopes Its New Logo Doesn’t Say ‘Copier’ ★
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It may not say photocopier, but neither did their elegant and distinctive old logomark. But their new mark does say “copier” to me, in the sense of “copied from every other 3D-glassy-spheres-and-swooshes logo of the last few years”. (Via Neven Mrgan.)
It’s not that companies with old logos should never scrap them for new ones, but that when they do, they ought to strive for new marks that will serve them well for decades to come. This new Xerox logo is going to look dated in five years.
- Final Post ★
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Posthumously published post from U.S. Army Major Andrew Olmsted, who was killed earlier this week in Iraq:
This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits.
- The NYT Introduces a Wordsmith ★
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James Fallows on neo-conservative William Kristol’s cliché-ridden debut as a NYT op-ed columnist:
Perhaps this is more proof of a cunning, leftist NYT master plot? Bringing in a conservative who will demonstrate that conservatives have little interesting to say?
- John Siracusa: MWSF 2008 Keynote Bingo ★
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Second column strikes me as the most likely winner.
- The Truth That Dare Not Speak: The CES Keynote Sucked ★
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Duncan Riley: “The Microsoft keynote at CES sucked.”
Shocking. I’ve never understood why Bill Gates and Microsoft have been awarded a perennial slot as the CES keynote. Microsoft is a tremendously successful company, but they’ve never been particularly successful in the field of consumer electronics. Their two big successes are the Windows OS and software that runs on Windows. Xbox has been semi-successful, but they’ve lost money to build the second- or maybe even now third-place console platform.
- Cringely: Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All ★
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Cringely, back in 2003:
Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as “scrutineers,” are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an “X” with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate’s name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don’t, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?
Update: Lots of email from Canadian readers who say that Canada’s ballots are far simpler than those in the U.S.; fewer candidates and issues to decide on each election day, and thus far better suited to a simple paper-based system. That may be, but certainly electronic voting machines are not necessary — the U.S. held plenty of elections before computerized voting machines existed.
- Andrea Jung Joins Apple’s Board of Directors ★
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Apple:
Apple today announced that Andrea Jung, chairman and chief executive officer of Avon Products, was elected to Apple’s board of directors.
Jung is the eighth member of Apple’s board, and the only woman.
- More on E-Voting ★
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Dan Wallach at Freedom to Tinker offers an expert critique of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine story on electronic voting machines.
- From the DF Archive: ‘Select Word’ Script for BBEdit ★
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An AppleScript I wrote back in 2003 to give you a simple command to select the “current word” in the front BBEdit document. Just fixed a few terminology issues that have changed in the intervening years. Tog be damned, I use this script at least a dozen times every day.
