this is mikel.org — Page 254 — Michael Boyle's weblog

Embrace file-sharing, or die:

February 4, 2003 by Michael Boyle

so writes John and Ben Snyder in a paper of the same name submitted to NARAS the other day. John Snyder is the president of a record label and a board member of NARAS, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences. They’re the ones who bring you the Grammy awards among other things.

At the end of last week Canada’s Privacy Commissioner

February 3, 2003 by Michael Boyle

released his Annual Report to Parliament. Check out the News Release, in which the report is quoted: “The Government is, quite simply, using September 11 as an excuse for new collections and uses of personal information about all of us Canadians that cannot be justified by the requirements of anti-terrorism and that, indeed, have no place in a free and democratic society.” Pretty scathing stuff. [via La grande rousse, aka Dolores]

Thomas Friedman has been one of the greatest

February 3, 2003 by Michael Boyle

American commentators since 11/09/2001, but his Op-ed piece yesterday in the Times was just silly it was so far off the mark. But no need to go into detail: Tom Coates has already deconstructed Friedman’s piece at his site plasticbag.org.

Holy crap:

February 1, 2003 by Michael Boyle

The Space Shuttle Columbia has broken up over Texas. There were six American astronauts and 1 Israeli scientist on board. Ugh.

The hot link of the day

January 31, 2003 by Michael Boyle

seems to be the link to David Heller’s article over at Boxes and Arrows: HTML’s Time is Over. Let’s Move On. He writes, “Ultimately, I donft see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution. It is a misapplied tool that was never meant to be used for anything other than distributed publishing.” Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be misinterpreting that as saying there’s no future for (X)HTML, period. It’s not. He’s talking about a much much narrower field than that: enterprise application development.

For those kinds of applications, and such applications alone, he’s right on the mark. In a more general sense, however, HTML is not dead at all – which I hope is precisely why Heller limited himself to a much narrower subject. The web grew in spite of enterprise application developers, not because of them. The web grew – and continues to thrive – because it required NO dev tools beyond Notepad or (in the day) TeachText. Anyone who forgets that (or never learned it) does so at their peril.