A different view of Comdex

A slightly different view of Comdex, from a senior editor of LinuxWorld. My favorite bit:

Fact: TiVo uses Linux as their underlying operating system.
Fact: Most TiVos are "set-top" devices.

So...

"Well, what's on the television then?" "It looks like a penguin." "It's funny that penguin being there, innit? What's it doing there?" "Recording TV shows."

Too much time on your hands?

If you've got too much time on your hands, check out this Myst-like game done in Flash. And when you hit the wall, the cheats are here.

Linky love

Scoble says:

Many of my newer readers don't know that Dori Smith is the one responsible for getting me into weblogging (she was a speaker at the CNET Builder.com conference that I helped organize).

<fe>Yeah, but he still doesn't invite me along to any of the cool parties he gets invited to...</fe>

Today's Pet Peeve

Pet peeve of the day: people who send email to the dori.com.br domain, but leave off the all important ".br" part. Especially when they send multi-MB files.

I'm getting close to the point of trying to figure out how to block all email sent from Brazil. I know that I could trash any email that's sent to an address other than mine, but I like the ability to have all email going to that domain (no matter what comes before the at sign) come to me.

And yes, I've written to the company and asked that they stress to their employees, vendors, and customers the importance of that ".br," but I never heard back from them. You'd think that the least they could have done is sent me some chocolate.

CSS Best Practices

There's tons of useful info at mezzoblue's CSS Best Practices. I suspect I'll be, uhhh, "paying tribute" to this page during my upcoming workshop at Macworld Expo.

Conservative Crack-Up

An interesting article from The American Conservative, Conservative Crack-Up: Will libertarians leave the Cold War coalition?. One of the main reasons I stopped registering as a big-L Libertarian was that I was disgusted with their pandering to the Right on civil liberties issues. Given that the Neocons are on the wrong side of both my fiscal conservative/social liberal opinions, it's interesting to see how other (big and small-l) libertarians are coming to see this, too.

DNC VoterFile XMLSchema

Oooh, what's this: DNC VoterFile XMLSchema. Hosted at xml.democrats.org, no less.

If you're on this list, check your feed

If you're on this list, could you please check your RSS feed? That would be you (problem report), you (problem report), you (problem report), and you (problem report). Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Shareware reviews in Macworld

Rogue Amoeba, in Macworld, "Shareware", And The Future, asks why more shareware doesn't get reviewed in Macworld magazine. Brent Simmons seconds their comments.

Our take is, if you want to know the answer to that, talk to people who write reviews for Macworld, like, say, us (combined years of us writing for them: 24). Tom may have some other ideas, but the answer is, simply to think about the purpose of a review, which is to answer the question: should the reader spend their hard-earned cash buying this product? What are the pros, what are the cons, who's the target market, etc.

When you've got a limited page count (and page count is limited by the number of advertising pages sold), you have to pick and choose what goes in. It's easy to leave off shareware, for the simple reason that there's no dollars being spent prior to the user checking out the application. If a review will only save the prospective customer time, not money, those will be the first products to be cut (or more likely, never assigned in the first place).

So while conspiracy theories are nice (I'm not saying that either of the posts above promote them; this is a long-standing question), it has nothing to do with shrinkwrap, ad purchases, or delivery mechanisms. Most (possibly all?) reviews are assigned long before a boxed copy shows up at the office.

And Brent... you may be more likely to get a review if you spell the name of the magazine correctly <g>. The "w" in Macworld is never, ever capitalized.

Send them back!

Send Them Back!! says you should send back your stolen MP3s to the RIAA.

Cheese pads

I'm not sure which is more worrisome: that Sean wrote "cheese pads" on the grocery list, or that I knew exactly what he meant.