January, 7, 2002 archives
michigan congressman conyers is going to hold hearings to look into payola in the radio broadcasting business. i guess he's not getting enough lobbying money from the radio and music publishing businesses. (i'd have less of a problem with payola if radio broadcasters had to buy their spectrum at auction.)
there's a great article on loudcloud's site about employee retention. it looks like that url won't be permanent, so here's the same thing as posted to the fork list. i wonder how much loudcloud itself lives up to this ideal.
verisign buys tuvalu's .tv for $45 million (cash). .tv paid $50 million to tuvalu to license the domain (although that deal was spread over 10 years, so they haven't paid it all out yet). i wonder if this means idealab! is cashing out some of its companies.
the big thing, aside from the money, that keeps me from getting a mac (like the cool new imac) is a remembrance of how mouse-bound the macintosh interface was. (and i assume that os x hasn't changed that dramatically.)
(i'll admit to being an atypical computer user, though. i spend 99% of my time using mozilla, mutt, tin, and a terminal window with bash and vim.)
much ado is made about voice recognition being the next big thing that will impact user interfaces, but i really can't imagine that it will ever make a big dent on the personal computer (outside of being used for dictation). what i think would be huge is eye-tracking. imagine being able to look at a link (with some subtle visual feedback that lets you know where the computer thinks you are looking), and just hit a key on the keyboard to follow it.
doing some more cleaning up, i've catalogued all the windows/dos cd-rom games i own. if you want any, make me an offer. i will throw almost all of these out next time i move. (the ones i imagine i'll keep are the first two x-com games, relentless, and the lucasarts non-star-wars games.)
in any case, they're now all boxed up and i'm once again left with a giant cd rack with nothing on it. that's up for grabs, too. i've got a couple of smaller plastic ones and a small wooden one i could also do without.