EMI and other members of the Irish Recorded Music Association are going to court to seek ISP records that they think will unmask a further group of file sharers, according to the The Legal Diary for the Commercial Court on Tuesday.
Joi Ito’s Web: Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s definition of Open Standards
Reading about Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s definition of Open Standards helps me think about better understand the work of the ICT subcommittee at NSAI
and the work of the character sets and coding group in which I participate in a small way.
Noirín’s Big Apple iBook by aspoke.com
Because she was feeling a little bit of Powerbook envy, Noirín decided to upgrade her ibook into a Big Apple with a unique aspoke.com laptop skin. She thinks the result is fantastic. Aspoke.com’s designer cropped the photo Noirín took on her digital camera a little and added some film strip edges to give the photo a little drama, then produced this beautiful laptop skin. When the laptop is switched on, the apple logo glows through. Here’s some more photos that Colm took. The picture doesn’t reall capture the quality of the printing though. The resolution is really high.
aspoke.com is free at last!
Welcome aspoke.com to the world! We’re now up-and-running helping people bring a bit of style to their humdrum grey laptops! Because we’re still making sure that everything works perfectly, we’re selling laptop skins for 18 euros (about 22 US dollars) for the next few weeks, which is one-third off the usual price of 27 euros. That price includes custom text or graphics, printing, laminating and all postage and packing. We have some great designs, but you can also send us your own design.
IE Domain Registry – the government consults
The government has its proposals for regulating and possibly taking control of the IE Domain Registry (MS Word document containing links to relevant sections) out for consultation at the moment. Responses to the consultation have to be in before 20 January 2006. The relevant text is also reproduced at the bottom of this post.
I have now been actively involved with issues around the governance of the IE domain for longer than anyone, and my personal opinion is this. I am very sad that the Irish Internet community in general and the boards of UCD and IE Domain Registry Ltd. in particular have allowed things to end up in this sorry state where an outside regulator has to be given powers to enforce its will on the system. As a community we should get together and sort this out. We shouldn’t have to wait for the government to come in and regulate our mess for us. Government involvement will ultimately result in more red tape, slower progress during a time of rapid technological change and higher costs.
Ejovi Nuwere — FON Advisors in America
Wireless sharing company Fon has put together a pretty impressive board of advisors in the US. Ejovi has all the details:
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Teaching programmers – Java and Joel
Joel Spolsky, whose books and website are essential reading for anyone involved in IT development, complains that today’s programmers can’t program, largely as a result of only having learned modern languages like Java, which don’t stretch students to the same extent as Scheme and C. I agree and disagree at the same time. Whilst I agree that these guys will never be able to advance computer science by programming up the next Google clustering system, maybe they will be able to solve the business, HR and user interface problems that cause so many IT projects to fail.
Arm-twisting by Irish banks – another scandal in the making?
Trouble in store from the banks. This story has emerged on boards.ie. Unlike other stories you hear, the facts of this one would appear to be readily verifiable. The boards.ie member writes:
I discovered that my signature had been forged on over £28,000 worth of cheques in the 3 month period. The forgeries were not very good. I called into the bank and spoke to the manager and asked him what was he going to do. He told me I would have to take it up with the banks legal department and he refused to give me any more of the back cheques that had been cashed … I took on a firm of solicitors and instructed them. 4 weeks later they withdrew as they had been threatened by the bank.
It goes on:
Bricks-n-clicks for quality shirts
Hugh McLeod who drives the online marketing efforts of successful tailor English Cut is planning to get the company into the shirt business, through a partnership with an existing firm. I think that’s a brilliant idea, but here’s how I think Hugh and Thomas should go a step further to really build a business they can change the world with.
Les Blogs: A next generation social conference
It’s a week ago, but Les Blogs (technorati“)was a conference with a difference in many ways, at least for me. Here were some of the interesting things about it.
– It’s hard for speakers and panelists to feel the audience is engaged when everyone is constantly checking their email and surfing IRC as you speak. Various tricks were employed by the people on the stage. One guy tried wearing a skirt while he presented his PowerPoint bullets to the passive audience. One lady ended up swearing at a member of the audience to drive her message home. Another lady had to resort to beauty, charm and wit (it was the only thing of the three that I think really worked).