14 December 2006 at 11.31 am · Filed under Random, Technology
Why not check out this web site describing the madness surrounding the distribution of “Lucky Bags” at the Apple Store in Japan? You’ll be linked to the Google Japanese language translator, which is part of the fun. As the translation helpfully suggests, “With Lucky Bag of Apple Store, it is delightful, full New Year.” (Apple made up some grab bags full of random goodies that people could buy at a deep discount. But you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve bought it.) Who could resist “being piled up with the queue before [paruko], hall muscle of mayhem”?
8 December 2006 at 9.43 pm · Filed under Culture, Technology
(Testing, testing, 1-2-3… is this thing on?)
Sometimes I love The Open Source Community and sometimes I don’t. Right now I am kind of mad at them for being so stupid.
The Firefox people have complained that other free, open-source projects including Firefox should agree to the Firefox terms. Under their terms, the code is totally free (”free as in freedom”), but the name and logo are property of Mozilla, so people have to license them correctly.
For whatever childish reason, the other people who are distributing Firefox refuse to sign on to these terms. It’s probably because copyrights are the devil’s spawn and anyone using one will have their hands turn black and fall off due to the sheer evilness. No, we should all be living under a Berkeley-style people’s republic with “copylefts” giving us all rights to everything.
So, it has come down to this: two open-source camps, one providing operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu, and the other providing a great web browser like Firefox, can’t work out their differences, and the solution is to rename Firefox. To… Iceweasel. Oh sure, the weasel was randomly chosen, has nothing to do with the weaselly tendencies of the Firefox people or their lawyers. And they’re already hard at work, wasting peoples’ time creating proposed icons for the new project. (My favorite weasel is shown here.)
As hard as it is to get people to consider alternate operating systems, why do we need to confuse them with these stupid little battles? Why are we expending precious energy making “new” things that actually don’t do anything different? And why do we keep choosing ridiculous names for products?! (I’ll never forgive the people who named their Image Manipulation Program “the GIMP.”)
By the way, I’m back. I’m sorry I’ve been away so long! A lot has been happening, which I’ll tell you about in the next posting.
