Friday, November 01, 2002

(update) Microsoft unlikely to appeal decision. Gates, Ballmer commit to "compliance" [InfoWorld: Top News] "compliance" is right...
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NYT.  A US judge approved the politically motivated MS-DOJ settlement. This proves one thing.  As a society, we are still in denial about corporate abuses of power.  Law, like any other system is prone to distortion by the views of the people that apply it.   However, this decision is the end result of the previous decision to settle the case.  The debacle of the SEC/MS settlement, given the copious evidence to demonstrate abuse, shows that this adminstration (a nice way of saying BUSH) is in favor of business as usual.  Unfortunately that means corporate greed and malfeasance is here to stay.  Given our present economic circumstance, another round of scandal is likely to plunge us into a Japanese scenario.  That is a situation where a country is so unable to reform itself that it continues to select stagnation rather than face the pain that will result in growth.   It is a country were the general good is overcome by the needs of a select few. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Amen. This ruling is a travesty - Microsoft was shown to have well and thoroughly broken the law, so of course they get off in such a way that doesn't require them to give anything to their biggest competitor - only commercial software developers can get access to the APIs, screwing open source out of the picture. Oh, there's a lot more than just that - but my god...remind me to give tons of money to political figures if I think I might ever get in any kind of trouble - 'cus it sure as hell worked for Gates.

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So Bruce over at "a blog doesn't need a clever name" and I have been having basketball discussions - his Wizards and my Celtics played last night. Problem is, his Wizards absolutely clobber my Celtics by forty-five friggin' points. Argh. Anyway, I think I may start a basketball category soon, and pull in other people's NBA-related posts from other blogs, a la Don Strickland's Radio Questions blog category. Anyone interested in joining in?

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Well, I've decided to try to do a little something for the Salon blog community - I've dumped all non-Salon blogs from my blogroll, added Salon blogs that I read or know are worth reading, moved the javascript higher up on the page, and labelled it as "the Salon blog community (partial)". I'm obviously missing good stuff - let me know if there's other Salon blogs I should be reading, and I'll toss them on the roll. And if you're not already reading any of these other blogs, take a look - there's good, good stuff there.

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Blockbuster debut for Vice City. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City¸ has sold hundreds of thousands of copies on its release in the US - plus other gaming news. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY] Wow - they've already moved near a million copies. If we assume $48 a copy (Best Buy had them for $39.99, but everywhere else seemed to be full price) on 750,000 copies, that means that in three days, $36,000,000 - a very respectable weekend gross for a major picture's opening weekend. And here's the thing - that's just about every copy available out the door. It's not like there's copies sitting on the shelves at Gamestop or EB, waiting to be sold. Sales won't stay at quite the same level, but I think four or five million units moved within a year is a very conservative estimate - and that would be 200 to 250 MILLION DOLLARS in revenue. Wow.

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Anil Dash: Microsoft's Weblog Software. [Scripting News] Interesting article - Microsoft's coming after klogs.
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A Hundred Thousand March -- Media Censors?. A couple of days ago, I got an email. The email went to a political list I'm on. It said that on Oct. 26, between 50,000 and 150,000 people had marched in San Francisco to protest against plans for war against Iraq. That wasn't the story, though. The story was that the national news sources had all but ignored the protest. Even stranger than that (it may be coincidence) I can't currently bring up any SF newspaper sites to verify this story. In any case, the email I recieved is below. Can people in SF verify that this event occured, and can people outside SF verify that they haven't heard about it? [kuro5hin.org] I heard about it - the numbers are up for debate, but attendance at protests and rallies are always underestimated by the "official" sources (police, park rangers in DC, etc...) and overestimated by the protest organizers and supporters. In any case, I heard something along the lines of 10 to 20,000 in San Francisco, and 50,000 or so in DC...

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