nocto

to scouts and guides the world over 22nd february is thinking day. it’s been a long time since i was a guide but the idea of this being a day to think about people all over the world, peace and international concord always sticks in my head. do some thinking today.

it’s quite hard to try and say or write all things in words with just one sound each.

conversations composed solely many syllable terminology very difficult. mindbending doing without monosyllables.

i’m just buying myself a new computer. i think nearly four years of using something that wasn’t new when i bought it shows i got a pretty good deal last time round. i hope i’ve chosen right this time too. last time i bought a refurbished pc that came without an operating system. this time i wanted various features that meant a new pc made more sense but i couldn’t buy what i wanted without also acquiring an operating system that i don’t want. i’m glad to see that someone is challenging this situation even if it is walmart.

the register guess that people will load their naked pcs up with pirated versions of windows rather than versions bought at retail price or using a free os like linux. they’ve missed the other choice which is that when you upgrade your hardware (rather than buying your first computer) you already own an operating system to put on your replacement pc. if the old pc is going in the bin, why should you have to throw the software away too? you might want to change to the latest microsoft os but i don’t think that you should be forced to buy it.

…in a galaxy far, far away…. telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl, then sit back and enjoy! amazing stuff.

[found via #!/usr/bin/girl]

the traffic signs of the world site collects pictures of three warning signs from around the world. the featured signs are “children crossing”, “falling rocks” and “men working”. i particularly like the commentary on the british “children crossing” sign that notes that in childhood the girl is dragging the boy across the road but in our superannuated “elderly people crossing” sign the woman is pushing the man onto the road. it’s odd what you never notice in the things that you see every day.

on the one hand it’s quite amusing that the winning bidder for kay hammond’s hand in marriage can’t be found. on the other hand i’m quite stunned that she was actually willing to go through with it.

• a) you’re wrong, see jason kottke for the details
• b) you’re wrong, there are plenty of other symmetrical dates, take 20:03 21/12 3002 for example.
• c) you’re wrong, there are plenty of other triplicate type dates, take 20:03 20/03 2003 for example
• d) if you’re american, you’re wrong, you are in all likelihood a user of middle endian dates and think it’s 02/20 anyway (though any gimmick that convinces people that middle endian dates are evil is good by me, for bonus points note that the big endian version 2002 20/02 20:02 has the same properties and also makes for easy numerical sorting into chronological order
• e) every moment is unique, make the most of all of them.

i was shocked enough by the story about another.com giving a ransom demand to it’s existing users to go and post it over at the end of free. another.com are a webmail provider who have been charging for their services to new users since last november. they’ve decided that existing users also ought to pay £15 a year to get their mail too. what’s shocking is that they’ve given users just three days to pay up or lose their email accounts.

i have no problem with paying for things on the web, in fact at the moment i’m getting irritated – mainly silently – with people who seem to think everything ought to be free. it takes time, effort and cold hard cash to do anything on the web and i don’t think anybody has a right to take it for granted that it’s free.

yahoo groups are, almost certainly, soon to launch a premium service and i see two different sides to this on the web. there are those who use the service as part of a commericial enterprise who are happy to be offered the option to pay for something more reliable and to be able to remove adverts from their pages. and then there are those who think being asked to pay for something that’s been free up to now is atrocious.

i think that the big problem with what they are trying to do now is that they are trying to offer a cut down version of what they currently offer for free as a premium service. the message archiving limits they are offering on the paid for service would cut one of my groups archives down to a couple of months worth of messages where we currently have over two years worth online for free. and the free service would cut them down so we wouldn’t be able to find the beginnings of conversations we are still having. i do think it’s fair to say “sorry, this all can’t be free” but i don’t think what they are doing is fair either. if they are going to charge, and i think they should charge, we should at least have an option to continue to get the level of service we have now even if it involves paying extra to have extensive archives stored, or to have lots of photos stored, and so on.

i also think it’s bad that yahoo groups are considering “no ads” to be a separate issue to “premium service”. when you think about it it’s only the same idea as a print magazine – you pay for it but you still get advertised at – but the idea leaves a sour taste when applied the web. it can be done differently here, so why don’t we do things differently?

the way yahoo are raising this idea has also got my knickers in a twist. i’m on lists where people are saying “well i’d have to leave if we had to pay because i can’t afford it”. this misses the whole concept of community which is what yahoo groups is all about. the charges shouldn’t be down to any individual but down to the list as a whole. whilst commercial users of yahoo groups might want to pay for their lists, there needs to be a way for communities to pay as a whole so those members who want to pay can pay and no one gets left out for lack of funds.

in summary, what i’m trying to say in a rather longwinded way, is that there is no divine right to free things on the web but that when things are moved from free to paying services it ought to be done in a way that doesn’t involve people to pay for a degraded service or being subjected to ransom and that even though the web isn’t a free thing the cost ought to be borne by users as a whole rather than users inividually. one of the good things about the “free web” that we’ve been used to is that once you’ve crossed the digital divide and got online there aren’t many divisions here and i don’t want to see them created.

something that really made me laugh today:

from moreover java news headlines and actually pointing to an article in the independent. the screw up in the independent’s rss feed made the article sound much more interesting though. definitely the last thing the nhs needs.

battleground god is one of the more interesting online quizzes i’ve seen and definitely gave me some food for thought. it examines the logical contradictions in your religious beliefs or lack of them. it seems equally amenable to those with faith and those without, it’s agnostics like me who get scuppered i expect.

[found via plasticbag.org]